Hi there,
We are reaching out to the community to help us deal with a situation that we have had over the course 2016. We are a small parts company in Canada. We regularly bought speciality parts from Japan through a company called Essex County JDM Tuners. They are located in Ontario so visiting them was easy, and they are very easy to deal with. We have never had an issue before with them until they started using an exporting company called Sastrad KK. The fellow that I have directly contacted a few times myself, his name is Steven Smith the owner of the company Sastrad in Japan. Webpage-sastrad dot com. The problem is not with the company we use for specialty parts here in Canada, Essex County JDM Tuners. The problem is with this Steve. I have seen the emails personally and the wire transfers to prove that this Steve character has indeed been paid for all of the parts and vehicles that we have ordered from Japan.
To say the least he is very unprofessional and always has an excuse as to why things are not shipped, or lack of communication.
A small run down of all the things that have happened:
Three vehicles were supposed to be booked on shipping vessels numerous times, and were not. (It has actually been about 6 months for one of the vehicles). He has put them at port, with no schedule of shipping for months. Who pays for damages when our vehicles sit there for months on end? On top of that, they were sent to the WRONG port. They were originally going to Nova Scotia Canada, but Steve was taking so long to get a quote for this service, that he was finally told to just ship them to British Columbia, Canada. No one told him to send the vehicles to port in the first place, and one of the vehicles was leaking oil, which was supposed to be looked at by Sastrad KK, but was obviously not. Essex County JDM Tuners received an email from Steve last week saying that the cars are booked for the 15th. But he has failed to update us since. We do not know if the cars are even actually booked, or if this is just another one of the many fibs from Sastrad KK.
Another thing. We have a bit of money invested into parts from Japan. We have been slowly building a parts cache over in Japan with Steve. However, he was told to ship this container months ago, and we still have yet to hear ANYTHING about the container status, or if he even has the intentions of following through with a service he has already been paid for, he charges 20% on all items by the way, so he is making some hard cash on most items, so there is no excuse for all of this. He emailed Essex County JDM Tuners last week, saying, and I quote: "Hi there
We will be shipping out your container this month. That's no problem. Also the cars are being booked. I have to have them moved from Nagoya port to Kobe.
Steve". This has been the response every week for a while now. At this point I would advise anyone from using him. I do believe that Steve is on this website, if he wishes to challenge these accusations, we have the emails to back everything up. From what we hear though, he has gone dark on everyone, so I do doubt we will hear from him on this forum.
Does anyone have any info on what the next steps can be? He is a registered dealer in Japan, and posts on other sites. As well, he has a dismantling license. There has to be something that can be done. He is a Canadian, and I have seen on his facebook that he visits every year. If anyone has any ideas please let us know. We are working with Essex County JDM Tuners in trying to have this resolved as quickly as possible.
This HAs been the regular for over a year now. Does not ship parts on time, looses parts. No communication for weeks. Bad excuses. Just all around bad business, STAY AWAY from Sastrad KK in Japan. DO NOT DEAL WITH STEVEN SMITH.