Leapfrog

Full review
We’ve enjoyed LeapFrog toys in our house since my daughter was an infant. The company has a wonderful reputation for making fun, yet educational toys for children of all ages, infants through preteen. Though we’ve had more LeapFrog toys than any others in our house, I’d never gone to check out their website until very recently. My son received a LeapPad with Microphone for Christmas this past year. We had plenty of books and cartridges for him to use with his new toy, but none that took advantage of the microphone. I checked out my usual toy-store haunts but couldn’t find anything. On a whim I decided to check out the source and headed over to www.leapfrog.com.

Something for Everyone

Before you even get to the shopping part of the website, you’ll notice that there are places to go if you’re a parent, a Leapster user or an educator. The parent site is still under construction, but there are some fun games for your preschooler to play in the Leapster world, and some good resources for educators in the LeapFrog Schoolhouse.

Navigating the Shopping Site

LeapFrog couldn’t have made it much easier to peruse and purchase their products, which is a good thing for any company. They’ve broken it into every possible category you can imagine. You can choose to shop based on the age of your child, the product you’re looking for, the price range, or the clearance section. Once you’re within your chosen category, you can choose to narrow your search even further, or you can look at their pages and pages of products.

My own experience was wonderful. I did a search for “Microphone” and was immediately rewarded with quite a few products to choose from. After I put four of the books in my basket, I decided to look around a bit more. I clicked on the clearance button and found a binder to hold my son’s LeapPad and books for 80% off, as well as three more books for my older daughter.

Purchasing

Much like any well established site, purchasing my chosen items was simple. Clicking on the “Shopping Cart” link at the top of every page will take you to your shopping cart, where you can review all the items you’ve chosen, remove any or all. At this point you can choose to create an account or continue with the purchase process as an unregistered guest, though you will still have to supply your email address. Enter your billing and shipping addresses, choose your shipping preference ($8.95 ground, $18.90 rush or $25.90 overnight), enter your credit card information (American Express, Discover, MasterCard or Visa), review your purchase one more time, and push submit.

I had an email in my inbox before I could even switch windows confirming my order. The next day I received another email informing me that my package had shipped. Two days after that, I came home from work to a gigantic box on my front porch. Yay! I love packages. Everything was packaged very nicely, but of the four books I ordered to be compatible with the LeapPad Microphone, only one actually was. The other three were the same title as what I’d ordered, just not actually for use with the microphone.

Customer Support

To return or exchange anything that you purchase from the LeapFrog store, you must first send an email to onlinestore@leapfrog.com with your original order number referenced in the subject line. I sent my email and received an automated message back within three minutes saying that my question had been received and standard turnaround time was 48-72 hours. In the meantime, if I had any further information to add, I could do so by either replying to the email or clicking a link that would take me to the website, where a ticket had been opened.

Four days later I received a second email, this time from a live person. She assured me that she was looking into the problem, communicating with their warehouse, and she would keep me informed. A week went by and I still hadn’t heard anything, so I updated my ticket with a simple question and heard back within two hours. The original customer representative again emailed me, apologized for the delay saying she’d been sick. She informed me that the warehouse was out of the Microphone-enabled books, and that they were going to refund my credit card, but they wanted me to keep the books for my trouble. The next day the refund was showing up on my credit card bill.

Final Thoughts:

The return procedure was a little unorthodox, but it showed me how sad it is that I think dealing with an automated Amazon-like return process is more professional than dealing with a real live person. But the attention received, even considering the week with no word, was wonderful. The shipping is quick, if a bit on the expensive side. The selection is wonderful. The site is easy to navigate. If the shipping were just a little bit cheaper, or based on what I bought, rather than a flat fee, and if I didn’t have to wait as long as I did for a response, this would easily be a five star site. As it is, consider my rating four and a half.

www.leapfrog.com