~Online Store Review: Korea Depart Makeup Haul!~

Hi hi hi! How is everyone? I'm super excited for today's review/haul!! I know I've just been doing a bunch of beauty reviews lately so instead of reviewing the actual products themselves in this post and make it super long, I'll just be focusing on the online shop Korea Depart (English website linked) and things like their service, shipping, quality etc. And I'll review each thing I got in this haul in a separate post sometime in the future!! Ready? HAULLL TIMMEEE!!

Oh wait pause...First a bit about Korea Depart!

So I have seen a BUNCH of things from Korea Depart in the past and just a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to try and order some stuff from there! Korea Depart is basically an online marketplace for tons of Korean goods that come straight from Korea. They have clothing and food categories so you can buy some snacks and even some cute clothes if you want to! But today I'll only be reviewing their makeup since that's the only thing I bought from them this time around ^.^

I have no idea why I never tried to order from this website before, but I think it was mainly because I was worried it would be a Taobao or Aliexpress situation and I might not get all of my items or something >.< eeeek! But after looking through the website and browsing through some of the items I was convinced I wanted to buy a few things! Such is the life of an impulse buyer...LOL!

I actually saw some Doraemon makeup products on someone's instagram post (I totally forgot who though oops!!) and I convinced myself right away that I NEEDED THOSE PRODUCTS. Hahaha~ And so right away I searched up where to buy some and Korea Depart came up. Since I had heard about it before I imagined it was a legit website so on that same day I placed an order for a bunch of things T__T lol. Yep I did the bad thing and didn't do copious amounts of research before buying from an online shop, and a OVER SEAS online shop at that!!! Don't ever do what I did guys!! Hahaha! But did I have a bad ending from my poor foresight this time around? Read on to find out! ^__^

One of the first things I recommend you do if you plan on ordering from this website is to set up an account! I know it's kind of annoying and you have to keep track of everything blah blah blah, but it will make the check out process much easier later! Not to mention you'll be able to see the status of your order in your account section if you sign up, you'll rack up some points from your order, and you are able to quickly and easily contact KD with questions about anything through your account as well! So trust me on this one, your life will be a lot easier if you just set up an account before getting started shopping! >__<

If you set up an account you can keep track of your stuff like so! Even if you don't pick the tracked option for shipping you can at least kind of know what's going on? [but def. try to get tracking if you can afford it (read more about shipping below)]

I placed my order on Feb 7, 2016. YEP. Right before Lunar New Year. GOOD JOB ABBY. Hahaha~ I knew that there was definitely going to be a break period and I was totally fine with it because I wanted my order in ASAP. On the website they advertised that they would be on break for three days I believe? Feb 8-10 I think it was! So I was prepared to wait at least another week until they shipped out my order.

I ordered six things in total:

A screenshot of what the order section of my account looked like after my items were shipped!

I started with the Doraemon items and discovered all the other character products from there *__* Hahaha I knew I had to slow down though because my cart was really filling up and I knew I didn't want to spend *too* much on this first order. But I still ended up making quite the expensive purchase for my first time...and here's why...

SHIPPING IS CRAY YOU GUYS. Ok I'm honestly not all that surprised that shipping was a beast because it's overseas and this website does their shipping by weight so the heavier your products are (in total with their packaging and everything) the more expensive shipping will be! And as you can see from my order, everything I ordered had large plastic cases, cushions, refills, and liquids! These things all really added up when it came to the shipping weight! Lol~

Another kind of interesting thing they do is they allow you to place an order and pay for it later! Not completely later but you are allowed to place your order and if you don't pay the cost of your order+shipping within two weeks they cancel your order automatically! So if you send the order form but don't pay and decide you don't want it anymore, you don't have to sweat it! They even tell you how much more you owe, so I think you might even be able to pay in increments as long as you get the payment in within two weeks!

One downside I found on this website though is that if you place an order and it's fully paid and everything but you decide you want to cancel it, they get to keep 10% of the cost of your order. And apparently if your package gets shipped back to them for some reason (you missed the pickup and you didn't get it at the post office so it got sent back for example) they won't refund you the cost of shipping it the first time and I think you might even have to pay for shipping it to you all over again?! I didn't run into this problem but I read it in someone else's review. Definitely do you research for people who ordered from KD in your country guys!! It will save you a lot of future stress and hopefully there won't be as many (bad) surprises! LOL

More about shipping: You've got two options- Registered Air Mail and EMS

Here's where things get me$$y! Hahaha see what I did there?

Registered Air Mail is like basic shipping when you purchase on any website. Since it's overseas I always think this type of mail takes FOREVER, not to mention there's no tracking for this type of mail! And I am not about that no tracking info life hahaha. I like to micromanage things so I'm a tracking type of gal hahaha. I highly recommend you get tracking because some people have actually had a lot of trouble with Korea Depart and shipping in the past! And I only know about this because I actually started researching reviews for Korea Depart after two weeks had passed and the status of my order remained on the "Ship Estimated" status. A lot of reviews said they had to jump through quite a few hoops to get their stuff including driving three hours to their customs place to claim their package and pay duties and whatnot. But pretty much all of those that I read that had that problem lived outside of the US! Apparently we have this thing with Korea where we don't need to pay an import tax if we buy from there. Nice. Still once I saw that my packaged shipped and I checked the tracking and it said my packaged checked into customs in CA I was worried.

Luckily my package arrive two days after it checked into customs and it was cleared right away!! YAY! (Oh man the anxiety of that was unbearable though when I first saw it lemme tell ya...hahhaa). So reading about all those issues really made me nervous about buying from here again. But I patiently waited for my package to arrive...

Once in the country you live in, EMS passes your package  on to your local shipping agent, for us it's USPS! One of the cool things about USPS is you can get them to send you emails or text messages of where your package is without having to go to the website all the time~ So I tracked it that way and found out that my package had arrived!! But when no one was home...hahha darn. No biggie though right? They said they left a note at the door that said which post office it was at so it could be picked up. That was on Feb 26! It was a Friday so I was home a bit late-ish and I asked my mom if there was  a note on the door about my package and if we could go to the post office to retrieve it. Yeah there was no note on our door, in our mailbox, or at the manager at the office (where the mailboxes for our apartments are). Soooo at that point I was very concerned and anxious about the whereabouts of my package. But I didn't stop there! I remembered there was a redelivery option that USPS does so I rescheduled my deliver for Feb 27 (that Saturday) aaaaand...

I actually opened the package upside down lol

Hooray!! It arrived! The post-person dropped it off at the office and I got the notice so I went and picked it up! Right away I looked at the address to see if there was anything wrong with it. I previously checked on the Korea Depart website on my account to see if I had accidentally put my address in wrong but it was correct so I was confused. On the USPS tracking info for some reason it had a different zip code where they tried to deliver my package and I was so confused. When I took a look at the package I saw that my zip code had been blocked out for some reason??! LOL? What?!

A very thick layer of bubble wrap protects all my precious products *_* hahaha

That was the only weird experience of this order for the most part. I have no idea why they did that or how that happened but if you have shipping problems it might have something to do with your address. And it's not always your fault! I'm just lucky they used USPS and all those options were available for me to use! YAY! Not everyone is so lucky with their orders 3: Sorry guys! I have no idea what that issue is all about but it was weird haha.

Yayy! It's so well protected by bubble wrap I'm impressed!

Alright! Now that I have retrieved this glorious package let's see the quality of everything shall we? ^.^
Real Quick! I forgot to mention Korea Depart does little events sometimes where they give you items with your order besides the usual free samples. Since it's Feb they had a Valentines Event going on!! *_* And I only found out about it when I was checking through my order after I had placed it an a few things were added on! So let's see some of the freebies I got!

Chocolate and hand cream! Yay!~

I find that whenever I order from a website that specializes in selling overseas makeup products they provide lots of nice samples! Korea Depart is no exception and they gave me a nice variety of things to try out~ I gave the serums to my mom and the whitening stuff to my sister. And for the Valentines Day event they gave everyone who ordered some Ghana Black Chocolates and Milky Hand Cream! They're both so cute and also kind of Halloween-y looking? Lol! But the hand cream smells so yummy and the chocolate is delicious! Should I include a review for the hand cream in my other post? Maybe I will ^__^ Hahaha

I haven't tried any of these yet! But those BB creams look quite promising! ^.^

OK, nowww we can move on too see what I actually bought!! Everything came very nicely packed and wrapped so they wouldn't be damaged. I found that a lot of the packages were actually slightly opened? I was wondering if that might have been from when customs checked though it? I don't know what their process is but that's my best guess for why some of the packages looked a bit wonky haha.

LOOK. HOW. CUTE.

Aren't they beautiful??? I focused on only buying character products this time even though they had a lot of stuff on there I've been wanting to try~ I think since shipping is so high I might just stick to buying the limited edition products from this website and everything else I'll look for on Pretty & Cute or Amazon or something haha. Do any of you have a good place where you buy your Korean/Japanese makeup products? If you have a reliable website I'd love to know about it! Please lemme know down below!


Overall:
Shipping cost 2/10 (but understandable): I already pretty much talked about this above but the shipping prices are ridiculous whether you get RAM or EMS! EMS is worth the extra payment in my opinion, not just because I'm impatient but also because I didn't want to lost my stuff haha.

Price of individual items 8/10: Yeah actually the prices of everything I bought was pretty good! Half of the items I bought were under $10 and the rest were kinda pricey but worth it because they come with refills! (Specifically the Doraemon cushion foundation and Moomin foundation were the pricey ones) but everything else was very well priced! And again the low prices made sense because of the high shipping cost, in the end it all balances out hahaha.

-Shipping time (EMS): Once we got through Lunar New Year and I didn't count the weekends and my package finally arrived to the states, it was actually pretty quick! I was surprised at how quickly customs went through it and it got shipped to me! Then again, the promise for EMS is that it'll come to you in 4-14 business days or something so I'm not surprised it came quicker than I expected! Usually when it says something like 4-14 I expect to get it on the 14th day but it only took about 5 days (including the USPS fiasco! lol) It felt like a really long time when I was actually waiting for it but looking back on it now it actually wasn't too long! Hooray!

-Ease of use (website navigation) 8/10: It's pretty easy to look up the products and scroll through and whatnot! I had no trouble finding all the stuff I wanted and the website itself is very simple and clean (cue music!! LOL). The only thing I found weird was that you can't "select" anything with your mouse? You know when you want to highlight your order number and copy and paste it into your notes to keep or something? Yeah I couldn't do that and it was a little weird haha. Other than that, it was fine!

-Customer Service 10/10: I did actually try out the Q&A section of my account where you can directly ask their service department questions and they answered me back within a few hours! I emailed them late at night (around 11 west coast time) and they answered back an hour later when I was asleep! So I was pretty impressed with that regard. Their answer to my question about when my item would be shipped was very straightforward and they actually were just about to ship it on the day I sent that question in lol I'm just impatient oops hahaha ^.^ No problems there!

That's about it for this review! Thanks for reading all the way through! Hahaha~ Please keep an eye out for my future post about how these products actually work :D Stay tuned <3 Please let me know if you have any questions about KD that I didn't address here!

I <3 Doraemon so much!!~ (pic from my Insta here!)

Hope you all have a terrific week! This spring sunshine is making me so happy :3

xoxo Abby