Yunnan Sourcing US - online Edit

I’ve only ordered from the US site, so I can’t comment on shipping fees from China. My experience has been positive in that they had what I was looking for in stock at a reasonable price and they shipped it out very quickly. I did interact with Scott via email and he was very responsive. We exchanged 4 emails back and forth in near real time in which he answered my questions. His replies were concise but did fully address my concerns. I will continue to order from them when they have something I’m looking for in stock.

I’ve had nothing but good experiences ordering from Yunnan Sourcing, both the Chinese site and the US site. The tea has been exactly as described, and the shipping while not inexpensive from China, was quick. US shipping was pretty fast. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with this company. I cannot speak to any interactions because I haven’t had any interactions with the site owners. I will order from these sites again.

This review regards a communication with the owner about making a purchase from the sister site: YunnanSourcing.

Overall Experience: DISAPPOINTED. I have yet to make a purchase from either YunnanSourcingUS or YunnanSourcing.

Contact Experience:
Last year I spent quite a bit of time looking at number of different Teas on YunnanSourcing (as I was originally researching the possibility of making a large purchase). After making a decision to try a number of them, and adding them to my cart, I finally entered my shipping information (I know now to look into the shipping cost first before I spend lots of time looking at their teas). I then found out the shipping cost was going to be about half of the cost of the tea itself. OK, maybe that’s because I have several different items in my cart. So let’s try reducing them. … Long story short, I got down to just one 50 gram bag of tea (the smallest available), and the cost of shipping ended up being much more than the cost of the tea itself! Just to clarify, there were no breakable items in my order, and I chose the least expensive method—the one which states may take up to two months.

Well, the cost of shipping for the 50 gram bag of tea was not acceptable to me. So I e-mailed the owner (Scott) looking for a better solution, and I told him I had a number of concerns, foremost being the cost of the shipping. After exchanging at least three different e-mails with him (with an initial statement by him that cheap or inexpensive shipping options existed on his site), and lots of time—and creative suggestions on my part, he finally put forth a solution to address one of my concerns. Unfortunately, his solution did not even address my original concern, as the shipping was the same. So, although I do give him credit for attempting to address one concern, I judge he did not address what was most important to me—the cost of the shipping—even though I repeatedly stated this. My responses were very detailed, and I spent much time making sure I was clear as I could be; his responses were very short. Still, I give him credit for responding. I have admittedly been eying a few teas on his new US website (this site did not exist at the time of our communications, and the shipping is much more reasonable). Overall, though, as I judge he handled our communication poorly, I am apprehensive about doing business with him.