My Experience with Glasshouse Inventory

Glasshouse Inventory provides an exhaustive inventory reconciliation service. I signed up for Glasshouse Inventory’s service mid-2016. I even had them go back into 2015 to see if there were any reimbursements that I had missed. I even thought so highly of Ashley, the principle of Glasshouse Inventory, that I was happy to have her present at ResellingDO3. At the time I signed up, I had gotten what was really a sweetheart of a deal, I think I was paying as little as $35 a month. Others were paying anywhere from $25-100 a month. 

Ashley grew this business very quickly, and at some point, she signed up some bigger Amazon sellers, and decided that they needed to change their business model. On 7 December 2016, she sent this e-mail out stating that the business model would change effective 1 January 2017:

A cleaner view of that new pricing option is below:

I opted to stay on, as I was curious to see how everything would work out. Here was my response. 

I received a response that essentially said that the lower subscription was a “beta testing phase” and the company had progressed. I get it, you have to make money. 

A few weeks later I received a refund, however it was insufficient, a couple of e-mails cleared that up, but it gave me my first concerns with the level of service I would now be getting, and in fact, paying more money for that degraded service. The key message though, was in response to my question of how the new business arrangement would work, this was the response:

I was sent nothing. In fact, I received no communication from Glasshouse Inventory for nearly a month, then receiving an e-mail regarding a new dashboard:

I get it, there are growing pains, but, again, related to my previous concern that as a smaller seller, I wasn’t going to get the same level of service as others, and I see at the end: 

If you’d like to schedule a training session, Ashley has availability the week of March 27

This e-mail was sent February 6. Message received, loud and clear. But I still held through for a week. Then, a week later, I had still not received an invitation to my new dashboard. I sent my message expressing my decision to change course.

I received a response fairly quickly, directly from Ashley.

She also included a screenshot of my dashboard–the one that I had never received an invitation to, mind you. It was still reassuring that she responded as quickly as she did. I want to highlight something here though, which again, gave me hope:

We will send an email when we’re finished with a record of your cases and reimbursements to explain your January bill and finish your services for that month so you can find an alternative going forward.

I responded to Ashley fairly soon after (as I was in Bali at the time):

Ashley responded with what I thought was perfectly reasonable. She answered my questions.

Then, a few weeks later, I receive an e-mail stating that I had a bill:

Great! I expected this, and I had seen a couple of reimbursements come through, but the number seemed a bit high. So, I go to the link, then download the excel of the invoice, expecting to see, as Ashley had assured me I would see – a record of your cases and reimbursements to explain your January bill. What did I see? 

Now, I don’t know about you, but that does not look like a list of all the cases and reimbursements. So, I logically sent an e-mail back–in fact, I sent two e-mails back, because I felt I might have been too harsh in my first response.

I received no response to those emails, but, then I got another e-mail Saturday and Sunday morning. I get that this is likely automated, but it still frustrated me, because I was not being provided the information I needed to be able to properly compensate Glasshouse Inventory for their services. So I responded again, this time including every e-mail address of the company that I knew–because maybe this was just an automated e-mail address that no one actually reads:

As of yet, I have not received any response, but the last bit of this did transpire over the weekend. 

Thoughts on my experience with Glasshouse Inventory

I have to admit, I was impressed with Ashley in the first few months of working with her. Like I said, I had a sweetheart of a deal; a fixed subscription cost. But when she made the change, I had the logical expectation that I’d receive those things that had been promised. Those included:

• Two Legal Agreements explaining the services of Glasshouse Inventory and timing
• A Mutual NDA
• A Dashboard
• A record of cases and reimbursements to explain my January bill

Unfortunately to the best that I can find in my e-mail (and I had to search through it to get all of those screenshots), Glasshouse Inventory didn’t deliver. Like I said, I get it, a growing company can encounter growing pains, but, logically, anyone would realize that when you’re telling your customer that you are going to charge them more, you want to back that up, right? 

I think the part that frustrates me the most is the lack of following through on promises. But, as I sit back and think about it, I can only imagine how many of the other “beta testers” feel. Glasshouse Inventory clearly cut their teeth on many of us smaller resellers, I dare say, many folks in the miles and points community, and to receive this caliber of treatment, is a shame.

Have you worked with Glasshouse Inventory? What was your experience?