"Tinywargames - Battle mat company" Topic

For years I have had incredibly positive experiences with many war gaming vendors including the likes of Total Battle Miniatures, Litko Game Accessories, Baccus 6mm (and many more). Folks like these not only sell and support great products but I have found them to be endlessly helpful, honest business people and a pleasure to deal with. It therefore came as a bit of a shock dealing with my first vendor who was actually none of the above so I thought it worthwhile to send a message in case others may want to avoid such an experience.

I ordered a high quality rubber battlemat from Tinywargames in February of this year and here we are in July and I still do not have the mat (he said it would take 2 weeks to be delivered). After the first month he had forgotten totally about my order so I had to send him the specifications again but to no avail. To date I have contacted him by email on 15 occasions and attempted to phone him numerous times and still no mat. He did, months later, send the wrong mat (a cloth mat that is worth about one third the value of what I paid) and I told him immediately that was not the mat I ordered or paid for. I finally just asked for a refund. He totally ignored my request. A month or so later I asked again (I only asked for the difference between the mat he sent and the one I paid for) and he said he would send it immediately. He has never sent it. Interestingly enough just a few weeks ago on his Facebook page I see him advertising the exact same mat I ordered. I am saddened by this whole affair and just want to make others aware of my experience with this vendor.

He stopped taking PayPal, right? Can you dispute the transaction with your bank?

As he did with his kickstarter he will drag the issue out for months. We were fed a sustained series of untruths and excuses through KS. Nonetheless, I received my order 10 months after he said they were shipped. This was after he previously stated twice over the previous 10 months that they were shipped.

I would stay clear of this company. It is a shame because the product that I eventually received was very good.

Thanks jhancock. My wife is going to look at the financial records and see if there is something that can be done.

That is not good.
Their address is now in central London (jewelry district). Maybe some changes happened recently??
Just a guess.

martin

I had a bad experience with him. Never again.

I'm still waiting for my KS to be fulfilled.

Thanks for the information. Always helpful to hear accurate information

How do they expect to stay in business with bad comments like these? They need to get their act together.

You can get safely most stuff from the Lithuanian company.

From my own experience. Not a good company.

He has an active FB page, maybe you can remind him about your issues there, in the public gaze?

I have a couple of his mats and they are nice but no way would l order any more after reading the high volume of complaints.

Thanks Londonplod… Good idea but I do not have a Facebook account so I can view the FB pages but I can't make comments. TMP has always been the center of my online war gaming so I thought it was worth mentioning here.

eldorado, I had a similar experience with Tiny Wargames late last year and earlier this year. I warned people about Richard's bad behaivour. I wish you had seen it and so avoided all this.

The mats are great but Richard's business manner is not.

TMP link

Marcus… I obviously should have done a bit more research before I bought from Tinywargames. Please consider this an extension to your good post of late 2019. I had to laugh when, in your thread, Richard Bailey says "we have now vastly improved and are back on track". Just another untruth!

Hi richard here from tinywargames. If those who are affected by delivery issues could email me I will reply. I have always replied and I am readily available on here by email twitter Facebook and Instagram as well as by dm on twitter and Facebook mostly from 6am to 10pm uk time. Yes we stopped using PayPal because they pretty much messed up our payment system in 2019. We have had some delivery issues during the pandemic along with material availability. Please not I always answer all messages. I always send free gifts to people who have suffered poor delivery. I can now say we use square payment systems with no issues. We have 2000 customers and at the moment running on a skeleton staff. I was sick in April with high temperature and a virus and was pretty much laid up for a month. It's unfair to say I don't reply as I am always available although the times are odd again due to the covid situation. We always aim to please all our customers . If anyone is unhappy please email me again with the order details and names etc and I will endeavour to correct any issues. It's difficult to recognise individual customers here? Thank you for your understanding in these difficult times. Note we are now based in Kent full time now. The last thing we want is an unhappy customer so please get in touch.

Richard, very little of what you say rings true with my experience. No, you do not answer all your messages, you answer very few of them. On the rare occasion when you did answer them you made lots of promises and did not keep ANY of them. If you were having troubles with your payment system that is certainly not apparent to me because the ONLY part of the process with you that worked was when you took my money immediately and then never delivered. I have received no delivery, no gifts, no apologies and no explanations… just broken promises. As I explained in my messages to you I understand if covid is involved in any way and that is when I just asked for a refund – something that could be done in private with no else else involved except a few minutes of your time and your device. You never sent it even though I asked on multiple occasions. Also, as I can tell by other responses to this message and the other thread by Marcus this is not an isolated incident and dependent on any given set of circumstances. I will now attempt to contact you one more time because I am indeed an unhappy customer and I will follow up in this thread with everything that you do or do not do.

As I said to you in my email just now I will offer a refund tomorrow as it's 1:35 in the morning here. I don't know who the other people are on this thread so I can't respond to them . But I welcome their contact. You were not affected by our PayPal issues as they were back last year. You were a victim of a in delivery of the wrong material which I offered to you free of charge. I always replied to you when I was able to in these difficult times. Again I apologise. Happy to refund and you can keep the cloth sent in error.

Refund and tracking emailed, please keep the cloth mat as a gift! Note we have lowered all our prices and added a new lino material. see Website tinywargames.co.uk

Richard contacted me via email and apologized. He could not refund me by e-transfer as requested because his financial company (Square) would not do so because the transaction was over 120 days old. He did however promptly send me a cheque via registered mail and provided the tracking information to me. I await the refund and hopefully when the cheque arrives we can bring this long episode to an end.

this is my first time looking at getting a game mat, so always glad to find out peoples experience with traders, really helps me make up my mind, i realise the comments were made over a year ago , but very helpful information guys

Well, I have to say that I did fine with Richard in 2019. My order arrived in a reasonable amount of time to the US. And I also have to say that I ordered from him because he has some of the best mats I have ever seen for naval gaming and I was very happy with the quality when my sea mat arrived. The price was reasonable for a beautiful lino mat.

well 4 emails sent over 5 weeks as of yet no response.

deepcut studio replied within hours, requested sample arrived after 3 days, mat ordered and received in a week

no prizes as to who i'll use for other mats

Not sure who the customer is above?