Adafruit Industries

This website is awesome. I ordered a whole bunch of their products, and all have arrived (Not always on time) how I wanted them. They even started manufacturing face shields and ventilator pieces! I am happy to have found Adafruit.

We are a very serious company and we don't have time to play around. The reason why we bought from them is because we thought we can trust them as many of you think. That's the only reason why we decided to pay 2 or 3 times as much for some items they are selling. We soon came to conclusion that higher prices does not go hand in hand with service or quality. They sell the same stuff that you would find on those cheap Chinese websites. We paid with Pay-pal. We had a exposition and had very busy times. After that was done we could focus on the bought materials. We open a refund request and as soon as we requested a PARTIAL refund our account got terminated. Who does such a thing? This reflects the personality of the CEO without any doubt. This is the worst customer experience I have ever had. You are far better buying stuff from a ghost website out in India or China as long as you pay by Pay-pal. I cant believe that such a big company in the US behaves this way. I must say this is not the first time I had problems with US companies when it comes to service. READ the negative reviews first!
They are the only ones that matter when you are out of luck not the positive ones! The positive ones should be more than normal that you are getting what you paid for ! There is no such thing as a positive feedback! Unless you get a surprise with it or bonuses or whatever, but I doubt it. READ the negative reviews only they matter the most !!! As a professional you can not rely on their support so forget it!

overall decent. They actually have a very wide range of products which is unusually nice for these niche tech companies. Customer service is average. However, don't buy anything that seems unique or has a possibility of not working begoz I bought some PowerBoost 500 thing to increase my voltage and the battery plug got stuck inside and broke. The charger also set on fire when I put a different battery in. That part was unfortunate.

Adafruit shipped the wrong item. When I send them an email about the item which was shipped in error, I get a the same canned response. It is like they have a robot program answering the emails.
They refuse to get me a phone nmuber so I cant get this issue with them resolved. Very unhappy about the lack of customer support.

Adafruit would not answer a simple question, if they have a they a vga shield. There reply was, 鈥渨e do not provide engineering support鈥? Wow! Pretty terrible experience!

So many cool things. Too bad about the prices, though. And shipping? Holy cow! $16 to ship a $29 item. No thanks.

And how can the username and password that logged me in 20 minutes ago stop working 20 minutes later (double checked password/caps, etc., still no luck. And where are those password reset instructions that your website claimed it sent me? I have been waiting and waiting, and nothing in either my inbox or spam folder after 15 minute. (Clunky and broken websites only add to the frustration.)

Ah well, I guess it doesn't really matter anyway since I will probably not be back to pay those high prices for both products and shipping.

By the way, I purchased the exact same item on Amazon for a comparable price and paid $0 for shipping (hard to compete with that, Adafruit).

Adafruit has a lot of products, but they are somewhat overpriced and the customer service and support isn't great.

best customer service i have ever dealt with, although a bit hard to work out how to contact them

I have bought the Adafruit Fona 808, actually many of them, but I do need some support, but as you can see there are no support on their forums.
I'm never going to buy any products at adafruit again, and I will never suggest them to others. So now I'm making my own 808 modem 🙂
And buying my hardware at Sparkfun instead

We sell products compatible to Adafruit products, and we have a statement (email to me) from Adafruit that it would be allowed to call our own products for example "compatible to Neopixel" or "Adafruit Neopixel compatible". Adafruit's Limor Fried is bigmouthing about how great they do for the Open-Hardware and Open-Source community, but on the other hand they keep opening intellectual property infringement claims on Amazon against our products, and have our products removed, risking our reputation and Amazon account health, despite the clear description of our products to be "compatible with Neopixel library for Arduino", for example. The only reason for this acting is, that Adafruit wants to sell their own, big time overpriced products, and fights other sellers of equal hardware. Limor if you don't want that other companies make the same products and say that their products are compatible to your's, then just change the license you use. To take somebody else's product (WS2812B LEDs), and give it your own brand name, and then fight everyone who mentions the compatibility with your product, is effrontery.

I bought three adafruit feather fona boards. One was working as expected, but the other two weren't recognized by my pc (since one was recognized correctly, it can't be a driver issue…). So I wrote a post in their forum (which is the only official kind of support they offer) but got no response. When sending an email, they only point you to the forums and that the will tell their support staff to have a look at my post. But, of course, nothing happened and my next mail was simply ignored. Worst customer experience ever – every shop on aliexpress has better customer support…

Adafruit makes and sells great hardware. I use them frequently since they carry a wide selection and provide tutorials for nearly every product they sell. This has helped me save enormous amounts of time when getting started working on a project. Since they are located in NYC, they will ship and deliver on the same day if you really need it and you're also in NYC (and I've really needed it in the past). Although I've seen other angry reviews here, I haven't personally had any bad experiences with their customer service. They prefer to provide product specific support on their forums since they sell many different items and this way the community can chime in with suggestions, usually even faster than they can themselves. For me, this is a plus. I've also only ever had to return an item once and had no issue getting the RMA and shipping the item back. As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy with them and plan to continue working with them for parts.

Bought a Raspberry Pi 3 board, and after two weeks of service, it died. Tried to contact customer service for warranty replacement via phone and email, and was referred to a forum. Sent four forum posts, which were ignored. Finally got a response after I emailed a bunch of times, and was told that since I opened the box, they wouldn't take anything back. They told me that I blew up the board.

These people warranty nothing, and refuse to provide any acceptable customer service. Buy from Amazon. At least they'll take things back that are defective.

Products shipped quickly, cheaply, and were exactly what I needed

Shipping cost was too expensive, so I gave up to buy from them.

We have been ordering thousands of dollars of parts through Adafruit for over a year, and the first time we reached out to them in need of some support, the Director of Support replied with the rudest email I've ever seen from a support team. We had a very simple request, and she didn't even try to help us, other than asking if we wanted to cancel the order. The worst part is that the reason we had to reach out is because they sent us 4 faulty products. She didn't even mention this in her response, and would take no responsibility for it. I'm taking my business elsewhere and I would suggest others do the same. As a business owner myself, I know there's just no excuse for treating loyal customers like that.

I had an issue with a product while following their instructions so I tried another part and my board started smoking so I emailed Adafruit. They told me to post in the forums. So I posted in the forums that they wanted me to post in. They never helped me. I told them I would file a complaint with the BBB, and they took that as a threat. 20 days after my initial email to Adafruit, I filed a complaint with the BBB. As soon as I filed that complaint, they banned my account and ip address. They kept responding to the BBB with the same thing saying they instructed me to wait for their support and not wire my board incorrectly my board. They never helped me. They said that I refused to allow help, I actually emailed them several times to try to move this along. They are also accusing me of threats that never were made. They never were able to turn over any evidence of threats to the BBB upon request. They finally provided a refund to the purchaser 40 days after the original email.

Don't expect any knowledgeable customer support after the purchase

A great range of microcontroller boards including M0-based ones that make this world far more accessible to novice programmers with Python support. Gemma M0 is wonderfully small and CircuitPlayground Express has a lot of features/sensors for the price. File system interface on those also allows programming without any additional software bar a text editor.

Very helpful development support via Adafruit forums and Discord.

I can't comment on Adafruit's online shop as I'm outside of the US – Mouser Electronics and the like are more convenient for me.

Banning people from their community for no reason. Then not replying to requests about why the ban was performed. By doing so even breaking several laws.

I came to Adafruit after purchasing some samples of their batteries, and being content with the quality, I wanted to purchase an in bulk order quality of around 150-200 pieces to begin. my requirements were simple, I needed reliable and ongoing large quantity orders of these. I asked if they were able to accommodate these quantities, because I would never order them if they can't. I also asked for pricing per piece of these large quantity orders. I submitted an inquiry. "Kelly", who was very rude, told me that no one at adafruit can answer any of my questions and basically told me to get lost. This is no way to run a business, and I am honestly disgusted with the customer service. I would not recommend this company to anyone and will continue to try to keep people away from them. Most other reviews seem to coincide with my experience.

Product didn't work as advertised. When I posted a question on their forum the "Technical Support Specialist" was rude, closed the post and basically told me to take a hike. If you are developing a product for your company do not rely on Adafruit.

This is not only a good website to shop for electronics like Raspberry and Arduino but also has a good learning section where you can find cool stuff to build.
I like to order from this site although it might be a little bit expensive to ship to the Netherlands because you will need to pay tax when you receive the products. But thats not Adafruits fault.

First and last time customer with Adafruit. WARNING to all who may choose to pay extra for faster delivery, you will not get it any faster. I selected 3-day shipping (for 11$ extra!) and then was informed a day and a half later that my item not only hadn't shipped, but was flagged and being held. Also they sent a confirmation email to me stating the 3-day shipping, was not actually three days but would try and get it to the ups store in a day or two, they said Saturdays and Sundays don't count, and the timer only starts the day after, I.E. if you order a part Tuesday morning, on 3-day, expect it the following Monday. Glad they tell you about that right after you pay, not before. i have asked for my order to be cancelled as their misleading timelines would have pushed me passed a deadline, I will update once (if) the money has been returned.

So, don't purchase here.
Long story short, product didn't work as advertised. They offered a refund on the forum. Cool!
I email support, they refund me and BAN me. What was I supposed to do? It didn't work how it was supposed to. Oh well.
Maybe it wouldn't have escalated if they just addressed my issue from the first of many emails.