I made my first order from them and was very happy. Since then, I’ve had such an issue with everything listed here, slow loading, dumping cart, prices being more expensive than other sites. I just gave up in frustration. I used to refer people to them too for first month, then after experiencing other vendors I stopped. It’s really sad, they have good product. But I have noticed they are not mentioned on most social media platforms anymore. Hopefully they will take all this feedback constructively and make some changes.
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I told them this a year ago to no avail. They have good prices and decent shipping time but the site is GOD AWFUL!!!
They keep recommending I ‘clear my cookies’ to get the site to work. Should not have to do this to use a simple website.
There is no other site in the world that has this issue; they need to get their ducks in a row.
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This is what my tablet showed me every time I went to the site. However, my phone and the other people I had check, were all able to get to it. I have done absolutely nothing different and now, magically, after this was posted my tablet can access the site. I’m sorry, I have a difficult time believing my tablet was not blocked.
There are far worse issues than just a frustrating site. I attempted to notify the company that there are issues with the site and the impression I was left with was that nobody really cares enough to actually do anything about it, based by the response from the person behind the screen. I could almost hear him laughing at me.
I can work around tech difficulties. I cannot however, work around a huge lack in customer service. Especially when all I asked was to have that person relay a message, something that requires the least amount of calories possible to accomplish. As it seems, I am not the only person who has tried to notify your company of this issue. Are we all speaking to the same person, or is this common practice throughout the company?
I do know this. I contacted the flavor place to ask them to hold my shipment because I wanted to add more items to it, ones I was planning to get at ecigexpress, and I was treated like a person, not a nuance. I also contacted gremlin to ask if they had plans to change sale prices anytime soon because I had sale items in my cart for 4 days now and still needed more time due to issues I was having elsewhere. Again, extremely nice and accommodating and did not seem the least bit inconvenienced to have to reply to me. There is no price I won’t pay for great customer service. THAT is the real issue here.
I do have same issues sometimes and for whatever reason this happened for the black friday sale. I could not load their site. tried over and over. Figured out it had something to do with firefox browser. Yahoo sometimes same and youtube misc problems especially autoplay function. Not sure what causes it yet. But ecx does always load slower for me too. I have found a closer business to me that offers way more flavors at decent price(a little more than ecx) but at 2-4 days faster shipping for me anyway.
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I have ordered a few times and really had no problem with my orders and shipping. I don’t like the web site at all because it is slow loading and buggy. I used to buy Medicine Flower (Lotus) there because they had them in 5ml bottles but since Real Flavors is coming out with more and more super concentrates I’m liking those much more.
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I changed the title a little - It was a wee bit aggressive I think 
I changed nothing else.
I have to tell a lot of people that, when they have problems with ELR - In a lot of instances the problems, whatever they may be, gets resolved that way…
Oh, and it’s not the first time I hear about the dumping of the cart - which is weird, because that should just be a session timeout setting somewhere that you can tweak. Personally I love the websites where you can log in, add stuff to your cart, and they stay there, so whenever you log in, it loads the cart…
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Sorry, I didn’t think it was. It was far more tame than what I really wanted to say.
I would have no reason to complain if I was away from the site long enough that my session expired. That is not the case here. I made a point to keep it active to avoid a session expiring. There is also no way to judge when it will dump. Say, every 24 hrs or whatever. No, just random. The icing on the cake was when I tried to tell them the site has issues and the way my comment was received by them. I can work with someone if they have tech difficulties and even errors made in filling my order, I completely understand we are all people who do make mistakes from time to time. I can’t deal with crap customer service, especially when I will be making regular monthly purchases. I did my time working retail and dealing with the public. I know how ridiculous and rude people can be to an employee, again, not the case. If it was, I would have no room to be making this post. I thought they may be unaware of the issues customers have with the site and might like to know so they could correct the problem. I was mistaken, they do know, someone does at least, but there was no concern expressed to fix it.
Unfortunately, this was my first experience with them and it was not a pleasant one by any means. I don’t believe in the whole customer is always right motto a lot of companies have, because they often are not right. I do believe the customers provide the paycheck they get and you don’t need much effort to try and be helpful with customer concerns.
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Hello, I am the Web Master at ecigexpress.com and appreciate your concerns. I am investigating the issue. Unfortunately the main culprit is often a corrupt cookie in the user’s browser itself, which we can not control from our end. This is why cart contents may get dumped (as the cookie holds the session data) and why you may recieve an error message like the one you reported in your original post.
I’ve had this issue on multiple sites using multiple browsers over the years and unfortunately clearing the offending cookie out of the browser is the only way to remedy the situation and no real way to tell what is causing the corruption. Cookies can be corrupted by the browser crashing, by multiple cookie overwrites, other programs that are installed to manage cookies or even your ISP or connection resetting during your session; all of which happen on the user’s end and is, unfortunately out of our control.
I will continue working on a solution but at this time dumping the cookie is really the only way around it.
One way to keep cart contents even if your cookies are getting corrupted would be to log into your account as the session can then get stored on our server tied to your user ID instead of being tied to your cookie session.
We are also in the middle of working on improvements to the site to improve loading speed and stability. We are listening and will do our best to improve these issues as quickly as possible.
Again, I appreciate your concerns and am taking action on them.
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i would say if this is your first experiance with them , hang in there they are a good company and do care at least the people i have spoke with and when i did have a problem it was corrected everyone deserves a second chance , clear your cookies next time you need something from them , i shop between three companies and they all have their benefits hopefully next time you try them everything will go well
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I totally agree. And I might be inclined to if it wasn’t for the fact that they refuse to address the lack in customer service.
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If the only way to correct the issue is clearing cookies, how is it I can access the site now, when I haven’t done that? I find it difficult to believe it coincidentally was unable to access it after I chatted with whoever, and mysteriously corrected itself after this was posted this morning. You yourself said the only way to fix it is clearing cookies, and I never did.
All this says to me is, it’s everyone’s fault but yours. My tablet has bad cookies, my browser is crap, my internet is unstable, basically my fault I cannot navigate your site. Yet, I was moving between 3 other sites fluidly, and then there was yours. Basically, your site was that one friend that every group has, that no one really knows why. They can’t keep up, always mess things up, constantly loose your stuff, always a pain in the ass, and they never see any of the misery they cause. Just completely obvious to it all. If you dare point it out to them, it’s never anything they did. It’s a problem with someone else.
There is something in the design of your site that is flawed, whether you choose to admit it or not. After seeing how many customers have turned away from this site because of these issues, I don’t blame you for trying to cover your ass and point the finger at everyone else. But, you are not blowing smoke up my ass. If it was something on my end, I would have seen this before. I haven’t, which tells me it is your site. It is the only one I have ever had a problem with. So, either your site is flawed, or its my fault but every other site is capable of handling it without issue, which still means it’s your site.
I have wasted enough time with this mess. It has been made clear that not one single person who is affiliated with this business has any concern for their company what so ever. It is ludicrous to sit there and tell me it is an issue on my end, when so many others experience it and countless other sites don’t have these issues. You obviously don’t need anymore business because I begged you to take my money for 4 days and you refused it. When I say 4 days, I mean Four. Solid. Days. Literally passing out in the wee hours of the morning while sorting this mess out and waking after a short nap to go back at it some more. Only stepping away for an hour at a time every so often. I only put this here so others had a chance to know what I wish I knew before I took this adventure.
Best of luck to you all, maybe you will make good on your word of resolving the problems. For the sake of your company I hope you do. It’s a shame it took something like this for it to happen. Obviously your customers have been trying to tell you for a long time and no one cared to listen. Hopefully it can serve as a learning experience for all.
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I am sorry to hear that you feel that way, HaleyMaley. We do care about every customer and every issue that crosses our desk, and I personally apologize for any inconvenience that was caused.
There are untold number of possibilities that can lead to the behavior you have described; some are in our control and some are simply not. However as I said, the main culprit (not the only culprit) is a corrupted cookie or other browser issue. Corrupted cookies being the main cause, customer service starts with that to fix the issue as quickly as possible to get you back in. I am not trying to pass blame here, but this particular type of issue is not an easy fix if we can not replicate the problem and I have not been able to replicate it.
But I can assure you that no one in customer service has the ability to block or unblock you from the site. Only I have access to anything like that and I simply don’t do it unless a session is seen as a risk to the server (ie looks like a hacking attempt) and it certainly hasn’t been done recently. If the server identifies you as a hacking risk, it will give you a 30 second “Forbidden” message, but it will not take you to “site not responding.”
I can’t imagine any way to make our jobs easier than to make customers happy by fixing anything we can fix when it is brought to us, and I assure you that we do care and I am working to find some way of resolving the issue.
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Pretty Good Customer service right there if I say so! they are reaching out to you. So I think it’s definitely worth giving them some kudos on the customer service front from this thread.
Redesigning a website is no easy task. Especially if many coders have made their imprints. I’m impressed hopefully for you @haleyMaley you get your flavours where you can. Thanks for persisting and you may have been the catalyst to get some more done. I too am impatient to use services that are just difficult. But if the price is right and can be persuaded. It’s all about weighing things up isn’t it.
Impressed to have the dialogue from all sides. Very good!
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I appreciate the response. I do very much. I haven’t read the responses below. Just a kind fyi…before this.
I am part of the younger computer generation…,I guess no longer young. Lol. I clear my cookies at every browser session. Either at the start or end. I always go with a clean slate. Why? Cuz I know the cookie jar effect. The crumbs that are supposed to help don’t always…plus I don’t like tracking. Thus when I had my cart issue, cleared cookies, reordered, then the payment screened screwed up…I would say it’s a cookie issue. Yup took hours to submit an order.
So the point of my post? Hmmm. I don’t think cookies are all to blame here. Part sure. But I think there is some coding issues or lack of support/updating for all the fun versions of I.E., safaris, chrome, Firefox, and the like…which is a pain in the A to do.
But as a side note I will be ordering soon. Don’t want to completely bash here. You haven’t a high level of selection of concentrates that other vendors don’t carry…which will keep me coming back
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Oh I am in no way saying that cookies are the be all end all of web development nightmares, not by a long shot, especially when one is dealing with a site with 6,000+ products. Obviously cross browser compatability is also a large ongoing project all in itself as browsers are constantly evolving and no two browsers have the same setup, plugins, addons etc
I was just saying that for the particular issue (the “site not working” issue) cookies are the most common culprit when I can’t seem to replicate it. But each instance of an issue can be it’s own bag of worms that need untangling.
When processing several thousand orders every week there are bound to be problems that crop up and we do our best to put them out when they do.
Anyone and everyone is also welcome to contact me directly or have customer service tell me they want me to contact them directly - as I work after business hours but am on call 24/7 for emergencies - and have me look at your website related problems personally so I can get them fixed as soon as I possibly can. Sometimes it’s benefitial to have customers available to walk it through with me so we can pinpoint the issue and if possible, fix it for everyone else as well.
I can’t stress this enough, and I’m just being pragmatically honest here, but my life is made so much easier when all of our online customers are happy, so it’s in my own best interest to make you all happy and fix things when it can be fixed from our end.
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I’ve seen this vanishing cart issue with one other site, not going to dis them because they’re great in every other regard. I’ll suggest to you what I suggested to them. Amazon, Walmart, nearly every high volume online shopping site, ties the cart to the user’s account, not to cookies. Most people who are savvy enough to shop online use some form of cookie busting security so tying the cart to cookies on a device is just asking to lose a sale.
When that item goes into that cart, that user is planning to GIVE YOU THEIR MONEY! Hell, if I leave items in my Walmart cart for too long, they email and remind me which usually results in me remembering to go buy them. So, yeah, ditch that cookie=cart scenario and tie the cart to the account. Other than that, my security won’t even let me view your site. Check into your certificates and load speeds too.
It’s a show of good faith and deserves mad respect that you’re here tying to sort things. Best of luck!
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Yes this is true Mizzz_Z_Hobbit. And just like the other sites, we do in fact tie the cart contents to the account if the customer is logged in. Otherwise, like Amazon, Walmart and the others, if the account is not logged in, and they are adding to the cart the only way to tie it to a guest session is via the cookie which stores the session ID to get the data from our site as there is no account to link it to.
If someone is logged in, their session should not dump their cart contents. I’ve only seen this happen with customers who have not logged in to their account.
As for your last paragraph, could you explain what you mean by your security won’t let you view our site? All of our certificates are up to date and we are scanned regularly by Norton, Comodo and a few others as well as being PCI DSS certified compliant with multiple firms to ensure site safety. Which security platform are you using? I can track down the cause with that information.
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Purged. Excessive forum moderation.
@core The cookie issue is only regarding a very specific issue addressed earlier “site not working.” It is not intended to address or disognse any other issues.
The mod_rewrite rules we use are industry standard and should be compatible with all ISPs and we do not rewrite IPS addresses other than concerning blacklisted IPs known for hacking and spam. I have not heard of a specific carrier like T-Mobile having an issue with either of these methods, so I will look into that as well.
Again we are in the middle of improving the speeds so please stay tuned for that. As for the login issue, I will be looking into this immediately. Thank you for the details, it does sound rather specific to some ISP as I am not able to replicate the issue.
Could you tell me what kind of device you are experiencing this on?
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Android (version?), Windows or Apple?
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Which browser and version?
Purged. Excessive forum moderation.
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