eCampus Review - Should You Steer Clear?

Over the last few years the textbook rental market has become incredibly competitive. While this has lead to a crowded field that can be occasionally confusing to navigate your way through, it ultimately offers a big boon to students. For example the cost of renting books has gone down and buyback prices have gone up, but more than anything else the competitive nature of the rental market means you no longer have to settle for a mediocre service like eCampus.

- eCampus has produced a relatively high number of customer complaints to the Better Business Bureau over the last three years compared to their competitors.

The Better Business Bureau reports over 330 official complaints leveraged against eCampus with over 70 of those complaints filed within the last year alone. As a point of comparison the poorly-regarded textbook rental company Bookbytes has only fielded around 80 complaints to the BBB over the last three years. These complaints against eCampus have run the gamut of categories, but primarily relate to problems with their products and services, problems with deliveries, problems with billing and collection, and problems with the company's advertising and sales departments.

- eCampus also produces a relatively high number of informal negative online reviews.

While all online reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, the overwhelming volume of negative customer reports surrounding eCampus makes it obvious that something undesirable is going on. Most textbook rental services will feature a disgruntled former customer or two venting online, but you'll be hard pressed to find a single positive mention of eCampus among the various review sites monitoring the industry.

- eCampus has been known to charge incredibly high fees for supposedly lost or misplaced books.

Some customers report that eCampus charged them, without warning, hundreds of dollars of late fees for books returned within the timelines they specified using the return UPS slip provided by the company themselves. In these cases eCampus' customer service was reported as being thoroughly unhelpful and argued that any lateness in returning the books constitutes buying them outright. Due to the fact that most people rent their books instead of buying them for financial reasons, taking the risk of being charged hundreds of dollars in late fees is unthinkable. Customers who have contested these fees and policies have been told that the company has no obligation to offer any refunds under these circumstances, let alone full refunds.

- There are too many superior textbook rental companies to choose from instead of settling with eCampus.

If eCampus was the only textbook rental company in the market than students would be forced to do business with them. Thankfully this isn't the case. There are many better book rental companies with superior reputations and fewer debilitating complaints. Chegg.com is a great example of a well regarded book rental company that's delivers the goods with minimal hassle, that provides excellent customer service, and which earns a high percentage of repeat customers. If you're going to rent your textbooks skip eCampus and go with Chegg.com. If you do decided to use the service than be sure to grab a current ecampus coupon to get the lowest possible price on your order.