The Gem Tree Reviews 146

Reply from The Gem Tree

Nov 27, 2025

Thanks so much for your feedback! We truly appreciate, glad you are pleased with our products :-)

Reply from The Gem Tree

Nov 27, 2025

Thankyou kindly for you nice comments, and its brilliant to know your mum really likes those fragrances! Much obliged to you :-)

Reply from The Gem Tree

May 5, 2023

Thanks for your order and review, glad you liked the mala :-)

Reply from The Gem Tree

Feb 11, 2021

Thanks for your wonderful review Mark! It is much appreciated and we are so glad we have been able to assist you in your queries and so pleased you are happy with your orders with us.

Reply from The Gem Tree

Jul 9, 2019

Thanks for your review and wonderful comments, we so much appreciate them. Blessed be )0( x

Reply from The Gem Tree

Sep 8, 2018

Thanks for your order with us, and we are very sorry you are unhappy with our service.

Regarding your email to us, you sent us an email at 13:24pm , and we replied to you at 17:01 the very same day (7th September). This review was published at 15:12pm on the 7th September. Whilst we endeavour to answer emails promptly, sometimes we cannot respond in immediate time as we are regrettably engaged in other work aspects. We feel our email response time is excellent when considering some companies quote 48 hours or more for replies. Our response time to you was approximately 3 hours and 30 minutes. So we did actually reply to you, we did not ignore you.

We received your order at 18:00pm GMT on Friday the 31st August. Unfortunately we were not able to tend to your order that night as we had finished for the day. We provide different postage options, and they are often different for certain items. As your order had a large gemstone specimen that needed more packaging, the available options would have been classed as Parcel level. We have First class or slower options, you had chosen the following service as can be seen on your order notification that was emailed to you:-

" Courier / Royal Mail Tracked Parcels (1 x 0.23kgs) (3 to 5 working day service): £3.30 "

In your review you refer to the 'First Class service'. I believe this refers to the review before yours where they had chosen First Class postage for a smaller item order. Since September 2016 when that review was made, we have also introduced 3 to 5 day services which can be selected for smaller Recorded delivery services (either Second class or Hermes or similar courier). In your order as mentioned, we had chosen the service that you had paid for on your order, if it was First Class parcels selected at the higher prices we would have sent at that level for you. The First Class service was available on checkout at a further 70 pence for the weight of your order, as that is difference Royal Mail charge us in comparison - and First Class averages at 1 to 3 days currently (excluding Sundays).

I did apologise in my email to you that we were unable to ship faster. We are a small business, and we do work very hard and most often 7 days a week. I did explain that at the weekend our work premises our mostly closed save for a small window of time on Saturday, and we mostly start packing orders on the following Monday. Our items are stored in professional premises, unfortunately not all of these premise types are open or fully open at the weekend while they are open for 12 hours a week on weekdays.

At the weekend we have another location where we list new items, tend to admin / paperwork and carry out many other tasks. Often we are working around 70 hours a week, so we do try our upmost. We have one member of staff currently who has been in and out of hospital recently, but able to work with the assistance of a morphine patch currently. So we are dedicated and we try our hardest to do our best for our customers.

Your order arrived on the morning of 8th September, and within the 3 to 5 working day postage service selected on your order. Some of the parcels we had prepared and sent had arrived the day before at some postcodes in the UK, so we are sorry that it had not done so with your order. With second class Royal Mail services, it is currently an average of 3 to 5 days, though some can arrive after two days after sending. I think the network may have been overburdened due to the time of the month with more activity than normal, which is why they give an average time frame and why we put 3 to 5 working days on that particular postage option and as disclaimer to cover all eventualities.

In our email I also mentioned that as it was the end of the month / beginning of the month period, we were more inundated with orders than normal. Your order was packed just before 4pm on Monday 3rd September, and an order update was sent just after that time. Regrettably, Royal Mail collect from us on weekdays at 2pm and this is the only time they can give us so our next collection was Tuesday for your order collected. Whilst we were able to get as many orders as we possibly could out on the Monday, we are sorry that even though we had worked so hard to be as fast and efficient as we could, due to us being a small business and with the busy workload we were unable to include 100% of the weekend orders in the Royal Mail collection for that day.

We will make the following changes to our service, and we hope this may improve our service in furture:-

- we will provide an automatic email reply upon receiving an email enquiry through our website, just to explain what timeframes we respond in and just to ask for patience within these timeframes.

- on our last page of checkout, where we say thankyou for your order, we will put a small disclaimer for people to check their order confirmation, and to let us know if they want to change the postage option they have selected for their order. We are a friendly bunch, so we are happy to help in any way. All order confirmations detail specifically the service selected and the timeframes of delivery once despatched.

- on our about us page we have added a disclaimer to explain about our order processing times, and how weekend (which include Friday evening orders) orders are handled as mentioned above. Where we have had the mention of "we strive to despatch orders within 24 hours", we will amend to take into account weekends.

- if Royal Mail give us a different collection time that is later than our current one when our yearly pickup contract is up, we will opt for this. The last few years however they have only been able to give us times at 2pm where we are located. This would enable us to cope better with orders placed over the preceding weekend, and help us do so when it is the end of the month period when we have more orders to fulfill.

Reply from The Gem Tree

Feb 5, 2015

Hello Tony. We think we may have finally figured out this issue, which seems to be only with Gmail. Hopefully this has been solved, and sorry you experienced this technical glitch with Gmail not allowing the confirmation to arrive.

Reply from The Gem Tree

Dec 9, 2014

Hi Annemarie. Thanks for your kind comments. We will take this on board for the future. These Alchemy Gothic pieces always come inside just the authenticated sealed bag. Some of the pieces are extremely large however compared to the one for your Grand Daughter, but we will perhaps add a gift box option in the future to the Alchemy jewellery range pieces that will fit inside an appropiate box. Other issues we have faced however, is gift boxes getting crushed slightly in the post, which would perhaps be more likely on its way to America. But we shall try our best for a gift box option for the future. Thanks again for your review.