Overview
Alright, so if you don’t know already… I’m a huge fan of the research chemical vendor Causing Color.
However, they’re not without their flaws… so let’s dissect them and find out once and for all if they’re worth it.
You’re not going to want to miss out on this Causing Color review!
And if you read until the end, you’ll discover how to get access to some of my favorite research chemical sources.
Causing Color Review
Causing Color has been on the research chemical scene for roughly…. 4 or 5 years as of when I wrote this article.
During this time frame, I’ve watched them struggle at various points.
Let me explain…
Causing Color is kind of like a wave… they go up and down in consistency.
While their products are always on point in my experience, their customer support, shipping times, and payment method is often times a hit or miss.
For example, at one moment their customer support replies will be top notch. In other words, you get a response right away and they generally clear up any issues relatively quickly.
But, there are other times when you won’t get a response for weeks or months… if ever.
Additionally, their shipping times are unreliable.
The problem isn’t that their shipping times are bad, the problem is that sometimes they don’t actually ship you the product for weeks or months at a time.
While this is a rare occurrence, it has happened to me multiple times throughout our history together.
When they do finally get around to shipping your order, you can generally expect to see it within 4-14 days.
Besides the awesome branding, another reason I’m a big fan of Causing Color is because they accept debit cards as a payment method.
However, this doesn’t come without it’s downfalls.
For example, there will be many times where I place an order and I cannot send my payment to them because their current account has been shutdown.
Sometimes they don’t setup a new account for days or weeks at a time.
Pretty annoying to go through the order process multiple times only to find out that you cannot pay them.
A rough past with their suppliers
Causing Color has had a very rough past due to supply chain issues (at least that’s what support has told me).
According to their support line, there have been times where their suppliers were up to no good.
In other words, Causing Color would put in an order with their supplier and they wouldn’t ship out the order.
I’ve watched this happen to them at various times throughout the years with different suppliers.
If this is confusing you, then let me explain the following really quickly to catch you up to speed.
If you don’t know, Causing Color doesn’t actually keep their own product in stock. They work with underground, invite-only vendors who provide the product to you.
Basically, Causing Color is just a middle-man that vets other vendors and enables you to pay through debit card or their brand instead.
In other words, they slightly mark up the special vendor price given to them as a service fee and take the margin from that to keep their service up and running.
How do I know?
I asked their support line.
The problem with their business model is that they’re basically at the mercy of the vendor to actually ship the product out to their customers.
Besides that, if anything goes wrong with the shipment of the order then Causing Color is blamed and not the vendor who handles the shipment of the products.
There have been a few cases where the vendor wouldn’t ship out the products to the customers even though Causing Color paid them to do so.
This resulted in the vendor getting all the money, the customer getting no product, and Causing Color getting blamed for not shipping the product.
From what I understand, there has been a few instances where Causing Color has lost out on tens of thousands of dollars because the vendor in question took the money and never shipped anything out.
When I asked more about this they disclosed a certain German vendor (who’s still in business) and a vendor from the Netherlands (who’s no longer in business) as their past suppliers who did the above.
As expected, they no longer do business with them.
Besides the occasional supply chain issue throughout the years (and the other issues noted above), Causing Color is a solid choice if you’re looking for research chemicals.