I received a catalog for Crown Galleries in the mail but placed an order for
jewelry through their website, www.crowngalleries.com. I placed the order the
morning of Jan 24, 2008. At that time, the check-out page said delivery would
be in 8 to 10 business days. My credit card was then charged the full amount
of the order on Jan 27th, which I (mistakenly) assumed meant it had been
shipped.

When the package had not arrived by the afternoon of Feb 6 2008, and no one
had contacted me about any delay, I sent an email to Customer Care for an
update or tracking info on the package. The reply came the next day, signed
only as Customer Care and with no contact name, and told me that one of my
items was backordered and that nothing had been shipped at all. When I
replied to complain that according to FTC regulations and consumer protections
they can't charge my credit card before they ship my merchandise, the reply I
received (the next day on Feb 9 2008 - everytime we traded emails it took a
day for a response)was unapologetic, but did inform me that my items have now
shipped (Joy!); however, I can expect delivery to take 7 to 14 days!

So, in summary, I was charged almost 13 days in advance of anything shipping
out, and now shipping, for which I paid a $6.95 shipping and handling fee,
will take as long or longer than the entire order process was supposed to take
in the first place. This leads me to ask if it's coming by pack mule or
something, but I'll leave that for another time. I may finally see my items
almost a month after I ordered them. I have yet to receive any product at the
time of this writing, but I've been through enough with them already to know I
won't be ordering from them again and will not recommend them to others. I've
submitted a complaint through the FTC.gov website, but wish to warn other
consumers to take care when doing business with this company, as well. The
shame is, if they'd just had someone notify me that there was a backorder
issue and let me make a decision about it, instead of waiting for me to wonder
why my items were, and just not charged my card until the order was ready to
go, all of this could have been avoided. I'm particularly displeased with the
lack of even an apology after I pointed all of this out to their Customer
Care.