Not the Brightest LightintheBox

I've been on this website for a pretty long time, at least two years. I talked about them on my past blog, Gun in the Blazer, and there I discussed my purchase about my skull headphones. They looked amazing and worked pretty well for a while. For a very short while.

The headphones themselves cost $11.99 ($17.02 after shipping). I can't remember how long the item took to ship, but it said between 10-20 business days. I still have the headphones because they make amazing props and the structure of the headphones held up amazingly through numerous moves. Their functions as headphones however, stopped within a month or so of me buying them.

I bought the headphones January 27, 2012, and after that, I had a $5. Two years and many emails later, I still had that $5 credit. They emailed me a few months ago, saying that my credit was going to expire in January of this year, so I finally decided to stop ignoring their emails and act.


One of the things I wanted to do was delete my account. I didn't want to see the emails anymore, and I didn't want to keep my information there. So I went ahead to try and delete my account.

There is [1] no option to delete your account and [2] no way to email them. I'm not kidding. This is the full extent of their Contact Us link.

Live chat? Very nice people, usually, but completely unhelpful. Most of the time when I'm online there's no one online. Customer Service has more of a "Figure it out yourself" way of working, which I have seen in action for the first few days of me trying to delete my account.

So I thought, "Fine. Maybe I just haven't given them a proper chance." I decided to just use up the $5 credit I had and try to give them another review. First off, let me say that, the credit ($3) apparently did expire January 08, 2014, but I still have $5 solid when I signed in. I haven't bought anything in two whole years between my last purchase and now. Seeing that I still had that $5 on there (and it wasn't a promotion), I didn't know what to think and decided to ignore their apocalyptic emails. Secondly, this was a process that took a lot longer than I anticipated. I picked a couple a products that I wanted to try. Out of the two, I chose which one I want and ended up accidentally buying the one that I didn't. It was an honest mix up, but hey, it happens I guess.

So I went ahead and cancelled the order as fast as it was placed. Unfortunately, the refund took 3 - 5 business days, but meh. Shouldn't have really have expected it to be immediate/next business day. I placed an order on May 22nd that wasn't able to get fulfilled until June 18th. Two things happened:

• Whenever I clicked the "sign into PayPal" option, the checkout form would shit out.
• Honestly, after that, I just forgot.

order numbers have been censored out

As you can see, I eventually decided on something. So here are the details. My original, cancelled order cleared on the 23rd, and I ordered something new on the 30th. It didn't go through until the 17th of June, and the order sent out on the 20th. But it says that it officially sent on the 21st?

Either way, it ended up getting to me within the week. Lightinthebox has pretty good shipping times; that's one of the things that I really appreciate about the site. I ended up getting an 8GB flash drive. At the time, it was on sale for $3.99, and I ended up using my store credit that they gave me. The Paypal checkout actually ended up working for me this time.

I like the flash drive a lot. I don't use it a lot these days, and I'm partial to making it a part of my main army. Mostly because the headphones I bought from LitB broke after a while.

There are a few positives to the site. It's very easy to navigate, and there are a great variety of products. There are some flash sales going on. The account page is very organised, making it easy to update your information, view your orders, manage your reviews, and more. It does send out a lot of newsletters, even for a weekly basis. A lot of mail received from them has a high possibility of getting lost in the Spam box.

Communication and Paypal cooperation vary between decent and flat out annoying. I have seen customer service reply to comments, reviews, and concerns in a variety of languages, so if there's anything to give them, it's that. The prices are actually reasonably priced—not just inexpensive. The products themselves are a different story. When it comes to Lightinthebox, it's a very back and forth experience. While the shopping portion is usually okay, I'm usually disappointed by the time I get to check out, try to redeem their coupons, or try to understand how their system works in general. For me, their helpline was only really helpful when I bought my headphones two years ago.

I've been trying to cancel my account for about a year (I know), and I was only dragged back to it because of my store credit. Now I'm sitting here debating if I care or not, considering how long it's been thus far.

In case you're interested, here's the 8GB flash drive I bought. As far as everything goes, Lightinthebox is definitely worth checking out. If only to browse the inventory. After that, I have to say it's all in the air. Account creation feels like a one way trap, but damn, those deals.