Mobtownoffroad customer service

Thanks Mike. I’ll badger Joe A. about it now.

 

Thank you so much. I appreciate the help.

 

I do apologize on the massive back log on powder coated orders. We have 32 orders at powder coating, that doesn't even include all the stuff we keep in stock. The oldest order dates back to 8/24/2020... I am as annoyed as you all are at this point. There are three local companies here that powder coat. All three do well with quality, only two of them are cost effective and both places are back logged 2 months. The issue is when you all placed orders, they had no work at all and then when I finished all the orders they were slammed. They claim they had a huge delay in obtaining powder and blamed Covid which I might be inclined to understand because we too faced long supplier delays all year as well. The good news is as of this past Saturday I spoke to the owner and he assured me I would have all the orders back this week. I then drove there this morning and he had about 15 orders done and was working on the rest. Again, getting back to everyone has been a challenge too and I am trying my best to do so. We lost our office person, again so I am back to doing that and fabrication. Hopefully once we get over this hump of orders we won't have to bring this up ever again.

 

While I would love to get my own sand blast booth, spray booth and oven it is just not that simple. It would require me to move my shop because I currently lease the space and we are already out of room. I would most likely have to build a place to accommodate all of this and now with land, steel and lumber cost doing what they are doing, that would be a terrible idea financially. Then you have to add on 2-3 employees to run the powder coat area which is going to cost a lot of money too with the push of increasing minimum wage. So, you are looking at a solid $1-2 million dollar investment in this area to make all of this come together plus production loss due to moving our shop. We would love to do it, but it just doesn't make sense.

 

I totally understand money can be an issue. Looks like y’all specifically do bumpers, racks, sliders etc correct?

 

For the most part, yes. But to be cost effective we run batches and to be cost effective with a powder coat line you want to run batches. No less than 5 bumpers at a time which means we’d need a good size booth and oven. I had all of this spec and quoted about a year ago. It’s just out of our ball park.

 

I too am struggling to get a response. Emails from February, March, April have gone unanswered. I sent a follow up just now to try and switch my order from weld on rock sliders to the bolt ons that are in stock now. Order #16107

 

I still have not received responses to multiple emails (1 from 6 days ago, 1 from 2 days ago)

And never received a status update or have all the missing items from my order shipped since before may 25th.

Waiting for an order since November then to have communications ignored and items not shipped is highly disappointing.

 

Heck. I’m amazed how many of y’all tolerate it.

 

Just got the emails that my (bare) bumper shipped, and that I was refunded the money for the powder coating.

Looking forward to finally get my hands on this thing.

 

If you don't have a plan to coat or already, the DIY route is satisfying.

 

It’s a rear swingout so there’s a lot more intricacies to it. Otherwise I’d definitely rattle fan or bed liner it. Yours looks great!

 

Guess my high clearance rear isn't going to make the trip to Moab.

 

Rock sliders came in today! There is hope people!!

 

Good for you, sincerely.

I sent an email 5/28 asking to have the powder coat cancelled for my rock sliders. Was told June 3rd that they were most certainly already in progress at the Powder Coater (paraphrase), so I couldn't get a refund. Looks like your contacts were around the same timeframe. Not sure why my request couldn't be fulfilled just the same way.

Now it's June 22nd, something isn't adding up.

Mobtown, that response was April 22nd. There is no way powder coating should take that long unless they are actually not working on it. I've sent yet another email to you. This is not acceptable.

 

Got your email. Order is cancelled. I’m not lying to you. Yours, along with 35 other orders have been at powder coat for 4 months. It’s an outsourced step, I’m the middle man. Every week I’m told “next week” by these guys. We stopped offering powder coat because of the issues with everyone local. We are trying to finish up all the orders that paid for it prior to us no longer offering powder coat.

 

You need to go pick up all your product, refund all the customers the powder coat fee and ship them the product and let them get coated themselves. The powder coat guy is making you look like a fool and your customers are paying for it. From this thread seems like the only thing keeping you in business is the product because the customer service and wait times are horrendous, just from this thread id never be a customer or recommend and that’s what you don’t want. May want to hire someone to manage the business seems you’re having a very hard time. These guys seem to really like the product. The quicker you can get things managed the better. I’m a business owner it can be tough and you have to be on your game 100%. Good luck.

 

No one is getting a great deal on powder coating from what I've seen charged for it from vendors. I called a local place, they will do small things for me like sliders, bumpers, skids, and the price is similar. I say start ordering bare steel and get it done locally or spray it yourself, touch up will ALWAYS be easier and look better than spraying paint over powder coat gouges.

 

I already called them this morning and told them to return all the orders, finished or not. Our lead times become horrible when ordered with powder. We stopped offering powder at the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021 because of this very issue. These are all orders that were placed when it was still being offered.

Just shipping orders and refunding powder also opens another issue. The customer ordered a powder coated item, and I’m giving them one that is not. They might not want that and cancel the entire order, which has already happened a few times… Basically, I’m getting hammered from every which way.

People don’t buy our stuff because of our powder coat. They buy it for aesthetics, price, functionality and quality. Powder coat is a service we tried to offer for customer ease, it’s clearly not working which is why we stopped offering it. I already know that if we stop offering it we are going to lose sales because the end-user also doesn’t want to have to deal with getting it coated. But at this point, it has cost us more money to offer it.

This is a bump in the companies road. It is what it is and we will move on from here once it’s over.

 

You’re right. We don’t mark it up at all because no one would pay it. We actually were losing money whenever someone purchased it coated versus not coated because then we had to spend another 30 minutes per ordering wrapping the products to protect them from shipping damage. We did it to help the customer, we ended up shooting ourselves in the foot instead.