Items are often out of stock
I have been buying from Beads.us for years and they were somewhat reliable, although I was always cautious and never referred people. I mostly buy beads and gemstones from them and the item quality is sometimes questionable on any other items. A couple of years ago, I was told I had a dedicated customer service rep to assist me with orders and she would check if items were in stock before I paid. This worked great for awhile, but this past year, it has become unreliable. A few months ago, I placed an order for 60 prisms that were very heavy and had a high shipping cost. When the order arrived, they were all loose in one big bag. Half of them arrived broken covered in the broken pieces of glass . When I contacted them, they offered a partial refund on the item but refused to refund any part of the shipping fee. I was frustrated but wrote it off. I decided to give them another try with some column beads that were hard to find. I put in a smaller order with a few other items along with the bags of beads. The bags of beads were heavy and made the shipping fees high. Knowing they were bad for refunding shipping fees, I wanted to make sure the item was available and checked before paying. They confirmed all items were in stock. It took over two weeks to process the order and today I received an email that I had a credit on my account for the bags of beads. When I checked, they refunded the cost of the beads, but not the shipping fees. So basically, they lied that the item was in stock and then kept the high shipping fee. I have reached out to customer service to request the shipping refund and will update this review if they do the shipping fee refund. UPDATE: They did refund half the shipping fees so I have changed my ranking but still left this info as you do need to be careful.