I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 2)

As it often happens, I got severely delayed with writing the follow-up article.

TL;DR

Pretty OK. The delivered ring matches specifications. Customer service not on the highest level.

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I took about a week for a ring to get made, and then couple of days for delivery. All things considered, the delivery is quick.

I took the ring to a local gemologist and they confirmed all of the ring stated characteristics. This was a free of charge appraisal and they did say that I might have gotten a bit worse color than stated in the specifications but also that it isn't something to be worried about because it happens very often it's practically normal.
Overall, an expert opinion was that I got good value for money, which was all I came to hear.

Moving on...
It turned out that I ordered the wrong ring size, it was too big. I contacted Glamira to arrange the return for resizing.

Also, after discussing it with my fiancée, we decided it would be better to have 14ct gold instead of 18ct, and to have a slightly larger stone. The price would remain the same. So, we explicitly stated these requests in the form that we sent back along with the ring.

I spent around $50 for shipping to return the ring.

Here we encountered some problems.
The ring originally comes with a black tag attached to it. Without carefully reading the instructions, I cut the tag when I was about to present the ring to my girlfriend.
It turns out that was a mistake. I should not have cut the black tag.

After you cut the tag, you can no longer exchange the ordered ring for a different one. You can only resize the existing one.

This would not have been such a big deal, but for the way they have handled this entire situation. My requests were very clearly stated in the form paper I attached with the package. There couldn't have been any ambiguity about what I wanted from them.

What they did was, they resized the ring, and sent it back, and without contacting me completely disregarded half of my instructions.

I had couple of phone calls with Glamira about this after they've already shipped the ring back to me.

Anyway, I was pretty angry at the time.
But the ring came back in perfect size, so I kind of made peace with it.

Hope this helps.

I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 1)

Introduction

First of all, a few introductory words. This is not an active blog, I am not a blogger. This blog dates back to 2011 and I have since written only several posts, some in English, some in Croatian. I'm from Zagreb, Croatia. You can check some of the old posts, they are highly uncorrelated :D.

The reason I created this blog is so I can have a ready place to put content online if I ever need such an outlet. I opened it on Google's service because I knew it will be crawled the fastest so the content will soon after publishing be reachable from the Google search engine.

Glamira

I decided to propose to my girlfriend. And thought that I could get a decent value for money if I bought the engagement ring online. I quickly learnt about the ways to rank the quality of the ring and the diamond (4C scale).

As I started searching, Glamira was one of the most aggressive advertiser. Going through their site, I saw that they also have the most diverse offer. There are literary hundreds of different rings to combine with dozens of different stones. They have a nice web app that lets you customize your ring very nicely. I also quickly went through:
77diamonds.com
bluenile.com
jamesallen.com
ritani.com

The listed ones only had very classic rings, about one fifth of the Glamira offer.


I made a shortlist and finally picked the winner.

Certificates

Going through the customization menus, I started having more and more questions.
With a diamond you get a certificate that proves that the diamond has all the characteristics that you payed for. The thing is, the institution that is issuing the certificate is the same one that is selling you the ring. Naturally, I was pretty suspicious about that.

However, if you pick a dimanond of 0.25 carats or bigger, Glamira offers you a GIA (Gemological Institute of America) certificate. GIA is, as I understood after some googling, the most trusted independent authority on diamonds. This option will make your ring cost up to 50% more.

Later I asked around with some friends who bought engagement rings in local retailer shops and asked them if they received the certificate along with the diamond they bought. They said "yes". When I asked about who issued the certificate, they looked at me as if they didn't understand what I was asking - "well, the shop, who else?!"

I went to couple of shops myself and asked about the certificates. Besides having only 5-10 rings to choose from. They assured me that the diamonds go through rigorous inspection by the state institutions. Since Croatia is a country with lots of corruption, I asked myself would I really trust some bribed paperpusher's approval more than a website apparently trusted by thousands of online shoppers.

Besides, I am thinking: "If I buy a ring with Glamira's certificate, what are the chances that they will deliver something 50% worse in quality than what they advertised?" (Because, that is the price difference)

Now, about the "apparently trusted by thousands of online shoppers" part...

I figured I will find dozens of different experiences of people buying from Glamira. But no.
Reviews on the glamira.com I didn't even read... Every site will pump its own reputation this way.
I found a collection of reviews on trustpilot. Most of the reviewers only had 1 review on their account. And the site warned me about how they deleted some of the nasty comments recently on account of being fake. I didn't know what to think of it. So, I guess this is the reason I am writing this post now.

Order

In the end I ordered a 0.1 carat diamond version of the metioned ring so the certificate option was not even on the offer.
The order was placed today (June 21 2017). I wait to see whether they have it on the shelf, or they need to make it first.

Fingers crossed.

Results

I ordered an engagement ring from Glamira (part 2)