Chewy's awesome, PayPal sucks
Updating this, in response to the excellent customer service care of Chewy-- and because I've discovered the issue is actually PayPal, not at all Chewy. It took us a bit of conversation and escalation up management, but one of Chewy's customer service supervisors, Corey, has been an immense and patient help. What happened: i was charged twice, and the second one wasn't supposed to be there. It got "stuck" as a pending hold. The company has been paid in full already. Chewy submitted a form to PayPal to manually release that secondary hold. PayPal's customer service has been awful about it! Today we just had a supervisor lady (who was appallingly rude and dismissive, holy wowza.) inform us she's sorry we were "misinformed" by the last rep Corey and I had spoken with, who said the release forms take 3-10 days to be processed. 11 days later and it's still not processed, and my money is still held hostage by PayPal. They've been so very rude to Corey, too, it's hard to listen to. Anyhow-- yep, guess I'll be searching for a different bank to shop on Chewy with! I feel bad for being so testy in the beginning, but once Chewy staff realized what the issue was (a double charge not a client just being confused about a prior authorization payment protocol) they've been nothing but supportive and enduringly patient. Also, thet ended up refunding part of my original order because the food ended up showing up ripped because it was packed with hard bird chew toys, without any packaging. That was a simple straightforward issue and Chewy had it solved the same day ;-; (It's unfortunately extra confused PayPal though, they keep getting hung up on "well they already refunded you" ooh myyyyyy gooosh please stop looking at any transactions but the one we're actually calling abooouuut) ****Original review for archival sake: I was recommended by friends to ship at Chewy to save money. Like many people, my budget is one sneeze away from being non existent. I submitted an order. No where did they warn me during order placement and checkout, that they would be placing an *additional* hold on my funds. I went to bed after paying. I woke up this morning to discover i had *two* PayPal emails saying i was charged the exact same amount (the full total of my order). The first was last night, and was a payment. As it was supposed to be, it was taken from my PayPal balance. The second email was sent hours later at five something am, and is a "pending hold" on my funds for the exact same amount, which drained the rest of my PayPal balance then went ahead and stopped into my bank account funds. I'm furious. I contacted customer support immediately to ask why they took my money then placed an additional hold when the payment already went through. I was told "payment is only charged when your items ship, after the hold is placed" Well very clearly not! The payment went through immediately, THEN hours later, they took an additional hold on my funds. I've been told to contact them with my bank on the line in 48 hours if the hold becomes permanent (aka, they take my money). I can't afford to shop at a place that's going to take double the cost of whatever I'm buying, then put it on my shoulders to make sure they aren't "accidentally" double dipping. This was really heartbreaking because i really wanted to shop there, they had a very good deal on bird food that was very helpful to my family this month, and they plain and simple do not care about how this affects someone with a low income. This will be my last order with Chewy :( I just can't believe they took my money, then hours later took even more and claimed it was just normal procedure for all orders. Bull dung. If very clearly shows the order things happened in my email history, and my PayPal transactions.