Because Buds removes negative reviews from their site, gets negative Google reviews taken down, and closes the account of anyone who leaves them a bad review, I created an account on this site specifically to post about it.
Just look at the serious lack of professionalism and customer care in their responses to the negative reviews here, since they can't remove these ones the way they usually do. Sorry, Buds, but you can't do anything about independent sites like this one, gun forums, or word of mouth - all of which are telling the truth about your poor business practices.
I also won't be reading or responding to the childish, unprofessional replies I'm sure this post will draw from them.
They will not match ANY price from anywhere else. Their "price-match guarantee," which they happily plaster all over the site, only covers a price drop within their own stock - not other stores. I've had at least 3 occasions where they wouldn't match a competitor's price, sometimes over a difference as small as $8. I ended up buying a gun elsewhere for over $50 less than Buds' price, and when I asked them to match it, their price actually went up instead. Staff are rude and will ignore you if you're unlucky enough to visit the store in person, and they clearly don't care whether any given customer is unhappy.
In the many complaints I keep seeing on gun forums, they'll tell people things like, "Cancel your order if you're not happy. We don't care." So keep that in mind if you're considering buying from them.
If you read through the many other complaints online, they're consistently about poor customer service and bad shipping practices. Sure, plenty of people have had fine experiences with them, and I myself was satisfied with them for a while - but one bad customer service experience outweighs a good one by a wide margin. I'm not talking about one small mistake here or there; I'm talking about how they simply don't care when they lose a customer, because they know another one will be along right behind him. Hopefully we can use the internet, which built their reputation in the first place, to put a stop to that by spreading the word like this.
I say this because this is essentially a drop-ship-style operation - they don't have every gun physically on the shelf. So when you order from Buds, they take your money, wait for the gun to possibly arrive at one of their stores or be drop-shipped from wherever, then it sits in their shipping department for sometimes weeks (meaning there's some kind of mix-up in their drop-ship process), and it eventually goes out to you.
On top of that, they sometimes ship the wrong paperwork, the wrong model, or even a used gun that was listed as new. You're shipping firearms here, not t-shirts - you can't get away with that, at least not with the gun enthusiasts I know.
Buds will keep disputing the legitimacy of complaints and pointing fingers all day, but the bottom line is that a customer isn't happy. A decent company's response to an unhappy customer should be, "Okay, we'll take care of that for you right away" - regardless of the nature or legitimacy of the complaint. Not "Cancel your order, then. We don't care."
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