We stand by our prices, no matter what! Like everyone else, we are only human and we have had a couple of errors on our website in the past or even items that may be confusing to some. What makes us different is that we don’t expect our customers to have to pay for our error, even if it costs us money. 

In the words of the company President, Tom Walz, “I would like to make money from my website because I would like to retire someday. However, I decided many years ago that I was going to run a successful business by doing things right. Among many other things, doing things right definitely means taking care of the customer.

… My dad was a big believer in things like telling the truth and owning up when you made a mistake. He definitely felt that part of owning up was making it right for anybody you had hurt or inconvenienced in any way.”

Here are some examples of how we believe in honoring everything on our website and customer satisfaction:

Example 1: We heard from a customer who had very patiently been waiting for their order which contained some quite pricey Woodpeckers products for over a month. Because they were larger items we scheduled the order to be sent direct from Woodpeckers.  This is not something that happens often, by any means and it is certainly not something that makes us or Woodpeckers very happy.

The reason the customer experienced such a long lead time was because it was accidentally shipped to an entirely different state than where it was supposed to go. Now Woodpeckers is extremely good but they’re still human so occasionally, rarely, but occasionally make a mistake.

We told the customer that we would have a duplicate shipment sent to him and it would go out overnight at our expense. We then contacted Woodpeckers who not only shipped immediately but they decided that they would pay the overnight freight which was about $226.

After this was taken care of, we got to thinking about the customer and the trouble he unfortunately experienced. We decided we wanted to do something else for him. So, in addition, we offered him a $50 credit for everything in our store or Tom’s personal one-time tools from Woodpeckers.

Example 2: We had an order for a couple of Woodpeckers flip stops.  Woodpeckers had been making them out of extrusions and they weren’t working very well. Due to the very nature of the metal, the aluminum tended to bind.

Woodpeckers spent several thousand dollars to have a precision plastic mold made. They now make the clamps out of plastic which works a great deal better. The problem was that we didn’t know that and the customer didn’t know that. Woodpeckers contacted us about the change and said that they would give us a set of the new plastic clamps free because the old aluminum flip stops weren’t available any more. We contacted our customer and told him that the aluminum flip stops were not available anymore. They had been replaced by superior plastic flip stops and that we would give him a set free if he wanted them.  Now, we could have charged the customer anyway for these new and improved flip stops even though they were free for us but why would we do that?

Example 3: We had a customer buy a router bit from an excellent company to use on plastics. He wanted to use the same router bit in a CNC machine and in a handheld router used freehand.  He also wanted to use it on Fiberglas. This is where the trouble came in.

The router bit that they purchased was not made for what they were trying to use it for which resulted in router bit breakage. We were determined to find something that would work for this customer whether or not they were using the router bit for something that was not intended for. We eventually supplied the company with fiberglass router buts from Southeast Tool completely on us. These other router bits ended up working beautifully for the customer, they couldn’t be happier and neither could we.

Example 4: We had our prices substantially wrong on our website for Wiha insert bits. The price list that we received from the distributor had listed the individual price instead of the package price. In other words, the bits are only sold in packages but the pricing was individual on the price list which we then added that price to our website, completely misunderstanding the price list. 

One day we had a customer buy a ton of insert bits from us with the wrong prices and they ended up saving a couple of hundred dollars while we lost a couple of hundred dollars. We didn’t make the customer pay the difference at all, our prices were wrong and that was not their fault; we simply honored them. After we realized our erroneous error, we quickly got everything together, figured everything out and began changing them on our website. 

Example 5: Wiha released a brand new 80 Piece Electrician Tool set at the end of July as another option from the older 80 Piece Insulated Set.  The new product is 32800 and the older one is 32877, they are both very similar to one another that there are only two real differences between the two: 32800 comes with a much more durable and heavier duty case and also a voltage detector.  There is a price difference between both products but that difference is purely the case.  Our representatives have informed us that the new case is really quite good; it is heavy-duty, durable and water tight with wheels for easier travel compared to the older hand-held case. 

Now, our product descriptions for both products did not really explain the difference between the two as well as they could have. We had a customer who was very confused between the two and we do not blame them at all!

What we did was gather all of the facts from our representatives on the differences between the two and contacted the customer explaining the two products further as well as offering them a discount and some free goodies.  It wasn’t the customer’s fault that the descriptions weren’t clear enough, we wanted to apologize for all of the confusion as well as thank them for bringing their confusion to us so that we can get solid answers for our customers and solve the problem.  We have since received concrete confirmation on the descriptions and have changed both product descriptions on our website to hopefully avoid further confusion.