Okay, hopefully I'm unlocked now and can post here...
I've had some good and bad experiences with Apollo products, though nothing but a top-notch experience with staff. Long story follows, will try to remember a tl;dr version at the end.
I bought some cheapo eGo knockoffs from a local smoke shop for me and my wife - they worked good off the bat, but I wanted backup power so I came back on here (was around a few years ago and dumped a ton of money into 510s but didn't stick with it). Bought us each an extra Apollo Superior EGO battery and CE4 clearos plus some
juice online after looking around a little for a California-based shop, hoping for a quick ship.
Well ship quickly they did - everything arrived in a few days and we were up and running. But almost immediately my wife's battery crapped out (later learned from a tech thread that the contact head wasn't attached right - pried it up with a screwdriver and it works as long as I only screw my clearo on about 2/3 of the way but I'm still kind of scared to use it).
I e-mailed support describing my problem around 8 p.m. on a weeknight expecting a response the next day - nope! Within about 20 minutes an Ashley was back to me and offering to send me a new battery right away or include one free on my next order. Since then I'd fallen in love with the EVOD clearos I got at a brick-and-mortar (and saw Apollo offered them about $4 cheaper online), so I ordered a bunch more, plus a couple boxes of spare replacement coils. After screwing up the order about 3 times (and contacting Ashley about it every time), I finally got things straightened out, and everything again arrived pretty quick, about 3-4 days from the Bay Area to San Diego.
But then a few days ago my battery's light went out. Annoying, but no big deal - I just have to take a test puff when I'm trying to turn it on or off to see if it's working.
The day after that, the battery button started sticking occasionally (maybe 1 out of 30-40 engagements, or 2-3 times a day for me). This is kind of scary, as I have no light to tell me whether the thing is engaged and it sometimes refuses to disengage, all I get is a gurgling sound from the atomizer to let me know that it hasn't shut off and to unscrew the battery quick...not sure what would happen if I missed that, but I've become a little paranoid and I'm afraid to find out. My wife's second battery, however, seems to still be working like a champ after 3 days of use - we love the styling and size on both of them, and performance is good, never had one run out yet.
Side note on
juice: the bottle I bought (cherry 18mg) tasted like crap out of the bottle. I've since learned to air fresh juice out, and after steeping for a week it's a lot better - not horrible but not my taste, though the wife loves it.
Side note on EVODs - although they're advertised on the site as Kanger brand, the expensive ones I bought at a local store say "EVOD BCC" on them, no markings on the ones I mail ordered. The coils are also in a different box (black satin box at store, plain white from mail order) - not sure if this means one or the other is a knockoff or both are legit with different markings, all of them are working in the same fashion (f'in awesome) at the moment.
At this point I'm a little hesitant to go back and whine again that both of the batteries I paid for are malfunctioning, they were helpful with the first one but I don't want to seem like I'm just trying to scam freebies, and if the product (from my very limited sample size) has a 66% fail rate I'm a little hesitant to keep going back for more.
tl;dr: Good prices, awesome customer service, questionable whether I'm horribly unlucky or if the store-brand product is substandard. Still debating whether or not to buy more because I'm so impressed with the people there...
