Norman's Orchids / Orchids.com

[harrefr]

It is such a shame so many of you have had a bad, negative experience with orchids.com. And at those prices, one would expect better quality and attention to detail. I have ordered 5 orchids from orchids.com over the last few months, and i haven’t had any problems with quality or shipping. They were all carefully wrapped in styrofoam sheets with lots of packing peanuts. The Mini Mark was the only one that was in questionable health. The micro mini Cattleyas were potted in tiny plastic pots packed tight with sphagnum, but given that they are so small, I guess that was appropriate. I do like the wide selection of orchids that they have, especially the mini ones…

[Clawhammer]

Originally Posted by harrefr

It is such a shame so many of you have had a bad, negative experience with orchids.com. And at those prices, one would expect better quality and attention to detail. I have ordered 5 orchids from orchids.com over the last few months, and i haven’t had any problems with quality or shipping. They were all carefully wrapped in styrofoam sheets with lots of packing peanuts. The Mini Mark was the only one that was in questionable health. The micro mini Cattleyas were potted in tiny plastic pots packed tight with sphagnum, but given that they are so small, I guess that was appropriate. I do like the wide selection of orchids that they have, especially the mini ones, so I would probably order from them again and hope for a similar, positive experience.

I urge you to consider supporting businesses that don't treat their customers like trash and routinely screw people over.

[harrefr]

Originally Posted by Clawhammer

I urge you to consider supporting businesses that don't treat their customers like trash and routinely screw people over.

I couldn’t agree more, there is no excuse for the way you were treated…deplorable, in fact. Do you have any experience with SVO? Their listings are a bit confusing to me, so it’s not quite clear to me what I am ordering.

[Ray]

SVO is top notch.

[BON]

I also want to say SVO is Top Notch! Extremely healthy, robust plants at a very good price. Add to that Fred Clarke and crew are Genuinely nice, very passionate orchid growers who will respond to questions via email about their orchids and you owe it to yourself to give SVO a try. SVO has a world wide reputation for orchid hybridizing excellence (Fred gets my vote for hybridizer Hall of Fame), and I greatly appreciate all the information listed on parent’s growth and flowering characteristics. If you have trouble figuring out what is written on the site and don’t want to do the research to figure it out send an email asking for recommendations based on what you desire. I am adding this to this thread because the question was asked about SVO.
To bring it back to orchids.com, I placed one order with them years ago, and was not happy with the quality of the orchids, especially not compared to the several hundreds of dollars for the order. I have not placed a second order with them, and won’t unless they have something I desperately want that is not available anywhere else, and even then I would understand it would be a gamble, the orchid would probably be weak and/or diseased. When you look at the sheer number of negative reviews for orchids.com it is pretty clear what one should expect. To end on a positive note the BEST things about orchids.com is they have a great domain name, and they post pretty pictures of what the orchids should look like on the website if they were well grown!

[Grawski]

I'm posting this experience here, and Norman's orchids is affiliated with Orhids-dot-com.

I purchased a Brassocattleya Rustic Spots 'H & R' from orchids-dot-com. It arrived today, and the photo shows what I found. I contacted them, and argued via messages, for 30 minutes. The contact person tried to tell me they recently whitewashed the greenhouse, and the spots were specks of whitewash. They then told me that I had ordered a Phal, and the photo was not Phal leaves.

Ultimately, I received Prepaid return postage for a yet to be seen full refund. The plant is packaged so as not to spread more malicious Whitewash.... Whoda thought.

[Ray]

ALWAYS pay with a credit card. If you don’t get what you ordered, simply challenge it with the card issuer.