Buying Diabetic Test Strips on Amazon: Our Experience

From time to time, we like to place orders from our competition to see how we're doing.  Recently, we purchased OneTouch Verio Test Strips from Amazon.  While Amazon's customer service was excellent, the product we received was not.

We shopped on Amazon, like a typical consumer, looking at merchants with good prices, good ratings, fulfillment by Amazon, and products eligible for Amazon Prime.  In addition, we looked for the product image of the product we wanted to buy, which looked good.

We placed our order on Tuesday, June 12th and looked forward to receiving the product in 2-days via Amazon Prime.  Our order was fulfilled by Amazon and arrived on Thursday, June 14th, right on time.

With the exception of temperature protection, our order was well packaged in cardboard.  We mention temperature, because it was 104 degrees in Las Vegas on Thursday, well over the 86 degree threshold for OneTouch Verio test strips.

While the package has a "pull tab" to open, the high heat melted the glue and our package opened easily at the seam.  Unfortunately, the contents of the package were not easy to look at. Yikes!  What did we order?

On closer inspection, the product was from Czechoslovakia and looked nothing like the OneTouch Verio's we thought we had ordered.

We contacted Amazon via email to let them know we were expecting a USA product, but received a product from another country and would like to get a refund. They were prompt and courteous:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon business and I'm sorry to know about the problem you had with your item "OneTouch Verio Test Strips".

On this occasion, we don't require you to return the item. You're welcome to keep, donate or dispose of it - whichever option is most appropriate and convenient for you.

Also, I've issued a refund of $XXXXX for the full amount of this item and associated cost.

Kudos to Amazon for taking care of the problem, however, there were a few observations from our experience:

1.  Temperature control was not considered when shipping our order.  Given it's summer and temperatures here in Las Vegas routinely top 100 degrees, as they do in many parts of the country, we thought more could have been done to address temperature sensitivity especially for test strips.

2.  It was surprising a product fulfilled by Amazon was from another country when the picture of the product clearly shows a US box.  It would be different if the merchant had shipped the product from their warehouse, but in this case, the product was shipped from an Amazon warehouse, so Amazon was aware this product was from Czechoslovakia.

3.  If we were out of test strips and actually needed them, we would have been in trouble.

Long story short, be careful before purchasing your test strips.  When in doubt, ask questions, so you don't end up with Czechoslovakian test strips.  While they look cool, we're not sure we could decipher the readings in Czech ;-)