Vancouver bakery review-bombed from Dubai after customer refused to give delivery address
A Vancouver bakeshop owner is speaking out because her business was review-bombed from Dubai after she refunded a customer who wouldn’t give an address for a surprise birthday delivery.
Fanny Lam, owner of Oh Sweet Day! Bake Shop in East Vancouver, was dismayed by the barrage of one-star Google Reviews — all because the bakery couldn’t call the birthday recipient the morning-of to figure out their address.
“Unfortunately, she was never able to provide us the delivery information. She provided us a phone number and asked us to WhatsApp what I assume was the recipient to collect all the delivery information,” Lam said.
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But Lam’s bakeshop works with a delivery company that requires delivery addresses in advance so they can schedule their routes — she can’t just contact recipients on the same day to get their addresses.
Lam suggested to the customer that they’d cancel the order since they couldn’t fulfill it to their desires — and gave them a full refund of $79.
But the customer was apparently upset that the refund would take five to seven business days to be processed — standard for many Canadian payment processors working with credit card companies.
Shortly after a rude email from the customer, a Google Review appeared from someone with the same name.
“The whole surprised was ruined,” a reviewer named Karina Shevchenko said. “The staff who communicated by email was rude and not attentive… bad service and unrespect [sic] for the client, especially from another country.”
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Her review was followed by several others — all from Dubai, from names the bakeshop had never done business with.
“Customer service is one of our core aspects,” Lam said. “When something like that happens that is not true it’s really frustrating. It’s really maddening.”
Running a small business is hard enough, without having to deal with review-bombing such as this.
“It’s fine for them to move on to another business that can provide what they want. But the fact they tried to pull down [my business] by leaving reviews like that is simply irresponsible.”
With files from Daily Hive’s Nikitha Martins
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