An Amateurish Looking Site With Strange Policies Leads Me to Say NEVER AGAIN
Ben Salem Naturals
I love to shop online and am always willing to shop at smaller, lesser known sites if only to see if they offer anything different or unique from the big guys. I stumbled across Ben Salem Naturals Online Store while doing a search and boy did I hate it at first glance. I have seen some really awful looking websites before but this one looked like it was designed by a six-year-old with a fascination for slapping every possible color, banner, link, and moving gif on one page.
I forged on though, mostly out of train wreck curiosity.
What the Site sells
This site sells a mish mash of things from herbs and vitamins, low carb products, women's, men's, and children's health items, animal products (Things for your animals not animal food products), kosher foods, natural dental care products, and fitness products — including the controversial HGH and other growth hormones and steroid-like substances and performance enhancers.
They tout that they have been selling "health and pleasure since 1989" but their site looks like it was made in 1989 and never updated since. Awful. I can't stress that enough and you will probably really be sick of me complaining about the aesthetics of the site by end of this review.
There is a large variety of items to choose from in the categories that they specialize in. Pictures and descriptions are non-existent so you had better know what you want when you go there because the navigation is like a text checklist without photos, description, information, ingredients, or anything else but the price and size of the item.
Navigation
A nightmare.
The home page is stark white with links everywhere, a banner that sends you offsite, blue boxes with eye scorching red print, bees flying around, scrolling text, and blue stars twirling about. It is as though the designer just found www.bellsandwhistles.com or some other website helper and snagged every amateur special effect he or she could find and slapped them all on the home page.
If you can get past all that, you can click into the actual site. Suddenly the blinkies and twirlies and scrollies are gone and there is a stark white page with a list of items in a long box with a check box next to each item. There is the name of the item, the size or quantity, the price and an order number. If you want the item you click the check box and add it to your cart. There is a "Tell me More" link next to each item name but it doesn't tell you anything more about the product you are looking at, just whether it is on sale or not.
If you know what you want and it's on the site, you add it to your cart and continue on. Navigation is dreadful but at least the pages load quickly since there are no photos or other graphics to contend with. I lost a lot of confidence in the site as I scrolled through it simply because of how very amateurish it was. I honestly never saw a website, barring free sites by non-html savvy average Joes and Janes, that looked so stark and uninviting.
There is a list of category links across the left side of the page which take you the white pages of text and the list of items carried. In some cases there are over 20 pages of lists of things. Scrolling through all that would be a terribly time consuming project. The only way to shop at this site is to know what you are looking for. This is clearly not a site that encourages browsing and discovering new items you may never have heard of before.
When you have finished shopping, you will be taken to a page to fill out your personal information and email address and choose a payment method. The site accepts major credit cards and Paypal.
Once you decide on the payment method, you either fill out your credit card details or go to Paypal and pay for your items. Shipping is added after you fill out your personal information but before you pay.
The theory is that your items will arrive within a week or less.
If using Paypal, you will get an immediate notification from them that you paid someone. If using a credit card, I assume you will receive an email with a confirmation number. I used Paypal so I am not sure of that.
I did get a letter telling me my items were being shipped out a few days later and then got my items in about eleven days.
My Experience
I hated the website. I hated the navigation. I hated the crazy set up and the way I had to do my shopping, I hated everything but I did want to try out the site and I did want a few of the items they were selling which were on sale for a good price. I overlooked the home page and the terrible navigation and went straight into a search for the items I wanted. They did come up and I was able to put them in my cart with no problem. The sale prices did show up.
At the end of the process, I got my shipping total, which I wasn't too happy about. My order was under $20.00 so they not only charged me $5.00 shipping but, on top of that, a $5.00 handling fee because my order was under the $20.00 threshold. So they expected me to pay $10.00 shipping on a $16.00 order? I don't THINK so.
I added an item to my cart bringing my total to about $22.00 and my shipping dropped down to $5.25. Crazy, innit?
The order then proceeded with me paying via Paypal and being notified immediately of the transaction from Paypal and a couple days later, being notified that my order had shipped. It took about eleven days for a small package to arrive. The packaging was quite simple but luckily my items were intact.
Still, there is no way I am going back to this site. I hate that they penalize a person for ordering less than $20.00 worth of products. It makes no sense at all to charge $10.00 because someone wants an $18.00 bottle of vitamins. Clearly, this company does that to encourage (force?) consumers to spend more than $20.00 to reduce their shipping rate. I say go somewhere else. Their prices aren't all that great and there is no excuse for any company to force people into having to spend more because of a bogus $5.00 handling fee.
Shipping and Returns
Shipping is $5.00 plus that nasty $5.00 handling fee (Total: $10.00) for orders under $20.00. It is then $5.25 for orders up to $24.99, $8.50 for orders up to $49.99, $12.00 for orders up to $99.99, $14.75 for orders up to 174.99, and free for orders over $175.00.
The Returns Policy is odd. There is a 15% restocking fee for returned items that are not used. Defective items will be replaced. You must contact the site for instructions on how to return items and to get a RMA. You will not get a refund if you don't have authorization to return an item.
Then it says that they will not refund illegal items. Apparently certain items like Growth Hormones and steroid-like substances are illegal in some countries as well as other chemicals and concoctions and, if you order them, they will sell them to you knowing they are illegal in your country but won't refund you if the package is seized by authorities for being illegal. Does that sound somewhat shady to you or is it just me?
Contact Info
BenSalem Naturals
371 Dartmouth Center
Bensalem, PA 19020-8204
Telephone: 1 (215) 638-0627
Fax: 1 (702) 993-2807
cheryl@bnatural.com for non-technical sales-related questions.
webmaster@bnatural.com - General technical problems with the website or shopping cart.
Conclusion
The site is a nightmare from the trippy home page to the boring and non-descriptive category pages. There are many items for sale on the site but, if you are just browsing to see what they carry, you will be disappointed since everything is just listed by name with no other descriptive information. This is a site to go to when you know exactly what you want and they are having a sale.
The prices can be good when they are having a sale but the shipping makes up for it in some cases, especially if you want something that is under $20.00.
That dreadful extra $5.00 handling/punishment fee for small orders, the fact that they knowingly sell items that are illegal in some countries but do anyway, and that there are no descriptions yet a 15% restocking fee applies to return items if you find that what you ordered isn't what you thought because they didn't inform you of what it was...all add up to a serious case of skepticism on my end.
I did get my products after a while and they were OK as I knew what I was looking for. I didn't have to return anything so I didn't deal with customer service.
However, had I had a problem, there is no toll free number to call which is a negative.
I can't recommend this site. There are too may negatives to offset the positives. It's a very amateurish looking and feeling site with some whacky policies.
Granted, it has a huge inventory and, if you know exactly what you want and spend over $20.00 so you aren't punished with the extra $5.00 handling fee, you may get a deal. The products themselves are probably fine. The ones I got were OK except for a bit of a shoddy packaging job.
I give this website 2 stars based on everything I said above. If you know what you want, do a search and see if the price is lower than other sites (be sure to figure in shipping costs). If so, you probably won't have major problems ordering from the site.
If you want to browse and discover new items on this site, good luck. You'll be there all night scrolling through list after list of text.
Plus the fact that they sell things that are illegal in some countries to people in those countries bothers me. I don't want to support that sort of thing.
I won't shop at this site again.
Recommended:
No
