ECU Worldwide Avis 

well like most here i can not give a zero star
and i think my star rating would be -50

28 years importing and my maker in india sent the container to them just to clear in UK and send to me
they lied about HMRC paperwork and had to get my UK agent davis&turner to step in and what a surprise cleared customs and a big bill from ECU for doing nothing I was hoping this reveiw would make them sit up but they will never do that after reading all THE REVIEWS so PLEASE PLEASE STOP DO NOT USE AND THATS A WARNING AS ITS JUST A BIG PIT OF MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN

Wasted all day trying to get freight release that was paid for several days ago. They keep transferring to different personnel but no resolution.
We are switching to a better forwarder.

Terrible Shipping company! Don’t use them. Slow, no response to emails. 5 Pallets sent to a Warehouse is Singapore and have been sitting there for 6 weeks with no resolution!!!

This company is a scam. They provided us a DDP quote and then then started tacking on a bunch of extra fees at the end of the process while holding our cargo hostage. Work with them at your own risk.

This is a company ECU Indonesia contains lot of mafia..I send personal items using shipment type LCL (small volume items), It is suppose to be low additional cost, our shipment service Al buraq cargo ltd informed us that additional cost in Indonesia max £300, but this ECU Indonesia staff adityar prakarsa charged us around £800; they charged our 4m3 items as 1 container for DO documents and for warehouse stay because they postpone our collection information to get more money..I hope Al Buraq cargo ltd will not use this company for their partner..A mafia company!

Absolutely abhorrent company. Liars and cheats. Do not use this company under any circumstance. Goods collected 30 July 2020, did not arrive until almost November 2020! And then they had the audacity to charge us for storage! It really is a pity trustpilot does not allow reviews in minus figures - they would have scored a solid -10!

Shameful.

Terrible experience. If there is a way to give "0" I would give it to them. My shipment was delayed for a month and a haft. It arrived from Europe in 15 days, however, took 45 days to finally arrive in Toronto.
Customer service is rude, departments don't have any connection.
Whoever runs this company has no clue of managing a company.

-5 Stars for these scammers.
DON'T ship with them or get them anything involved with your shipment.
Bunch of rubbish.
Besides of all the... they do, they would charge for another 5 days storage after the final payment has been done.
Will share the full story once we get all the evidence together.
BE AWARE OF THEM .
DO NOT GET FOOLED FROM THEIR RUBISH EXCUSE RESPONDE.

I would give them no star if possible. My shipment arrived and ecu sent us an arrival notice. I kept contacting them from the day they sent me the email asking about the custom clearance process and what docs were required. For 2 days it was just one guy forwarding emails to his team asking them to advise and then no response. They finally figured out i dint have a broker and i asked them if they could be one. Then they sent me necessary forms to fill. We were prompt in sending back the filled forms and docs required for clearance. No response. I ask for updates. No response. The same guy forwards my email to the team asking them to respond. No response till the mid day and they close at 4. GREAT! Weekend came we lost 4 days in the process and our goods started incurring charges to be stored in the warehouse. Monday i start contacting them and enquiring about the clearance. No response. The same guy forwards my email to the team asking them to respond. midday a team member responds (Finally) saying that it would take 24-48 hours for clearance. LOL then why dint you do that before. Anyways to this point they havent given me a quote and when asked their justification was that i dint ask for it. SO i asked and they provide me with the quote. And then a guy comes out of no where and asks me to go find another agent as i was disrespectful to them. SERIOUSLY you expect me respect you when you show no respect to your customers. Anyways i was on a lookout for another one. So i dint waste time. But just wanted to point out how incompetent these people were.

PLEASE DONOT USE THEM, THEY ARE THERE TO WASTE YOUR PRECIOUS TIME!

The funny thing was in between all of this i spent half my time talking to customer service agents, and they advised me not to go with ECU as they delay and are backed up. And that they wouldn't recommend ECU to any of their customers as a broker because the team is so slow.

I think 1 star is too much,
It is the worst service in all my 30 years of logistics service in the US.
The rates are low to attract the customer, the service is very bad and then the expenses at destination with their agents are excessively high.
they catch you and charge you later.
They are scammers.

This shipping company was not my choice but used by a shipping company in the UK (which was also terrible) to transport my goods across Canada to my home address. They were a dreadful company to deal with, staff blaming other staff members for mistakes etc. Even though I had paid for my goods to be delivered to my home address which they agreed they had received the payment and instructions for, they were still adamant that I had to travel 5 hours to clear the goods with customs even though customs stated I could do that in my home town. They also mislaid my shipment, stating it was in Vancouver when it was still on the East coast. I eventually had to pay another shipping company to transport my goods to my home address which was hassle free. My advice would be to research your shiping comany very thoroughly as this one was just abysmal!

I shipped my personal items to El Salvador. EC received them. I just needed a little guidance to get my belongings. They were not helpful at all! They were horrific! I had to find friends that shipped items to help me... Do not use a company that does not help you retrieve your items...it can be a challenge. I dealt with their rep in San Salvador. Just awful experience! I do not recommend them

Their service is rude and unresponsive.
Do not use their door delivery service. I had to use my own truck and trailer to pick up an item I paid $700 door delivery for from the location. They are horrible.

I have spent the last week or so debating whether to file this review, not wishing to revisit once again the maddening problems and suspect business practices my family was confronted with (and confounded by) when we hired ECU Worldwide. In the end, I decided to share my story in detail, if only as a warning cry to others to avoid the kind of customer frustration, unethical business practices and severe property damage that we could not. I write in particular about ECU Netherlands, based in Rotterdam.

Last year, I had shipped some of our belongings from the States to Italy using other refight forwarders, and had no problems whatsoever. Then came ECU. Where to begin?

Let’s start with invoicing. After over 6 attempts via email and voice mail to find out the status and final pricing of our shipments from America, I was shocked to find that the original prices ECU had quoted to us — in writing — had suddenly been jacked up to quite ridiculous amounts, sometimes nearly 80% over the promised amount. This all-too-obvious strategy was applied continually by the Import Manager of ECU Netherlands, a lady named Karima who simply insisted that ECU's previous written offers were not “final” until she had “approved” them herself — i.e., until she had taken the opportunity to do the final jacking-up to unacceptable levels. She applied these hikes first to the items shipped from LA, then she applied them to our items shipped from New York, and finally for the trucking of the consolidated shipments from Netherlands to our home in Italy. A triple whammy.

Did Karima not think we would notice the fudging? Did she not understand that what she was doing is an unethical business practice? I let the company know this in later emails. But it was only after I politely threatened to pursue a more “formal" recourse through Holland’s version of a Better Business Bureau that ECU finally come to its senses and jacked the prices back DOWN. But only somewhat.

Upon inspecting ECU’s final invoice for their overland shipment services, I discovered that Karima had proceeded to double-charge us for the trucking costs from the ttalian customs warehouse to our house several hundred miles away. When I pointed this out and asked her to take off the additional item, she refused and noted that it was “either this way” or no way at all, snd that she had already extended to us enough “discounts”. (Discounts? As if NOT jacking up your original written quote is considered a discount?). But by this time, what could I do? Our goods had arrived from America and ECU was holding them, in effect, “hostage” in their warehouse in Rotterdam. We needed them in our house in Italy. I caved in and paid the illicit charge.

But what was truly most maddening about the services of ECU was the appalling condition in which our cherished household furniture and antiques arrived. After being professionally packed in LA and New York three months earlier (by other companies), the truckload of goods finally arrived in our eastern Italian town, albeit three weeks late. Once they were hauled upstairs to our second-floor apartment by some extra hired local hands (ECU refused to deliver them door to door as the other company had done), I proceeded to carefully open up the first furniture crate, expecting no problems ....and nearly wept. My grandmother’s rosewood antique table —handcarved and much beloved — — was virtually ruined. Two of its four elegantly carved legs were horribly split off from their moorings and and splintered at the ends, its dragon-claw feel deeply scratched and broken. I have since been told that the only way this could have happened given the professional crating was from severely careless mishandling, possibly due to dropping the crate from a substantial height.

More packages, more pain: There was the cracked glass of our beautifully packed display cabinet and, just below, the six-inch gash of broken and splintered wood scarring its front. Not to mention the countless scratches and scrapes. All chronicled, as with all the damages done in these shipments, painfully and thoroughly, in over two dozen depressing photographs.

I then proceeded to unwrap our home’s wooden antique love seat and discovered that its carved backpiece had, unbelievable, been ripped entirely off… and then SCOTCH TAPED back on again.

Finally I unpacked our corner wooden bookshelf to find it nearly completely collapsed, its supporting wooden pegs broken and its backpiece also destroyed. A whole side was scratched deeply with parts broken off and chipped. A similar fate had befallen our second large bookshelf, with attachment hardware broken, the shelves caved in and some wood ripped off. How could this happen?? At least the the cardboard of the book boxes had managed to escape damage.

All of this was beyond painful to experience, and way beyond forgiveness. My family has suffered over $1500 in repair bills alone trying to rescue this furniture and save my parent’s inheritance from the inept hands of this shipping company. We feel betrayed.

Sad to say, we would sue ECU Netherlands and ECU Worldwide if we could. But we probably can’t. Why? Because ECU Worldwide refused to sign any service contracts for these shipments, and insurance companies need these, of course, to process claims. Through such strategies of negligence, freight forwarders (and other companies of course) shippers can avoid legal responsibility for any mishandling or bad conduct.

Faced with with the urgent need to get our furniture into our home after already extensive delays, I then proceeded to make a mistake — a big mistake. I went ahead and used the “services” of ECU anyway, without a contract in place. My fault. I had tried to save a few hundred bucks by using a “bargain" company instead of a slightly more expensive but surely more professional competitor. Well, you get what you pay for. But certainly not what you deserve.

Readers, if there is any value to in reading this review beyond the obvious advice to avoid using this freight forwarding company, let it be this: Never ship through any company without a seal-tight contract in place. And NEVER use a company who refuses to send or sign one.

To end this tale of woe: After weeks of stress and frustration and anger at the accumulated follies and misdeeds of this company, I reached out to the head of ECU Netherlands, a Mr. Ricardo Rens, to ask for his help in resolving all our issues, I provided him with documentation of the misquotes by the Import Manager. I left him three email messages and two short phone messages. In the end, however, all the reaching out was just more wasted time. Because after multiple requests I never once received the courtesy of a reply from Mr. Rens. His assistant, a man called “Op," would only say that “Mr. Rens is out of the office for a while. I’ll have to take a message.”

Surely a company’s reputation and ethical stature in the industry is determined by the quality of its management at the top. I found that quality of management, at ECU Netherlands, to be shamefully lacking. While there may be plenty of employees in ECU who are genuinely honest and professionally capable (I found a couple myself), the very fact that my family suffered the extensive, unaddressed and unremedied problems that we did attests to one illuminating fact: ECU’s business practices should be investigated and monitored by people far more consequential and official than we, a few abused and unhappy customers. I hope they will be. For everyone’s sake.

PS. To the office of Mr. Rens: Thanks for taking this message, which I assume Mr Rens will read eventually. No need for him to answer. I will be out of my office for a good long while.

Have used these guys for Importing from China. Very clear information and personal service. Goods arrived on time and delivered quickly. would recommend.

I used this company in the past with good results but the woman I dealt with unfortunately left.
She was great, I guess sometimes a company’s success depends on people like her. This time a man handled my shipment. It was without the worst shipping experience I’ve ever had (and I do at least 20 shipments like this one per year) Mr, (let’s call him Con) overcharge me by 300% compared to what I used to pay previously for the exact same shipment. I felt as if I was being held ransom by him, I needed the shipment and he sent me charges after charges. In total I ended up paying 1280£ for a shipment that had previously cost me 412£! The mistake was to use him (and Eculine) as clearing agents. I strongly suggest you never ever use Eculines UK branch as your clearing agent. People like Mr Con will take you to the cleaners! And he couldnt even provide me with a breakdown, let alone recites!! A complete disgrace, hopefully someone @ Eculine will read this review and act on reports like these once and for all, emails sent to senior management fell on blind eyes, no reply, hence this review.