Send a Cake Review: Cake Delivery

Send a Cake is pretty easy to understand: the company's mission is right in its name, after all. James, the owner of Send a Cake, created the business to make it easy and affordable to deliver memorable gifts that center around everyone's favorite celebratory treat.

Best-known for pop-up surprises

The first decision you need to make at Send a Cake is "large or mini?" The 3" mini cakes are the hallmark of the business - because you can order them in special surprise boxes that erupt with confetti, flying butterflies, or your choice of a bunch of other fun features (including music). It's like the ultimate pop-up birthday card... with cake! These are usually priced around $50.

About 8 mini-cake flavors

Once you've chosen which surprise style you want, you'll choose a cake flavor. The mainstay here is the chocolate chip bundt cake with fudge frosting, but for an upcharge of $5 to $15 (depending on the flavor) you could go for red velvet sparkle cake with cream cheese frosting, strawberry shortcake with an edible candy bow, a gluten-free lemon cake, a vegan carrot cake with vanilla frosting, and several other flavors.

Large cakes also offered

But, if you want to send a cake that everyone can enjoy, you'll want to look in the "Traditional Large Cakes" section of this website. Unfortunately, there are no vegan or gluten-free cakes in this section, but you can choose from traditional flavors like red velvet and chocolate fudge, something international like the Viennese Sacher torte, or celebrate Pride with a jumbo rainbow layer cake. Prices range from $56.95 to $69.95. You can also scroll down a bit further to drool over Send a Cake's cheesecakes. They carry the classics like original New York style and strawberry, but we were intrigued by flavors like mango and triple chocolate.

Shipping is reasonable but not displayed right away

How about shipping? When you go to enter the desired delivery date, you'll be able to see if any of the dates on the calendar will come with an extra $20 overnight delivery fee. On the next screen, you'll be asked if you want to add shipping protection with Route; while we're not the biggest fans of tacking this on just so customers can qualify for a refund if something goes awry (we think that ought to be a given if you're offering good customer service), it's becoming more common with smaller businesses. But, you're still going to have to work your way through several more screens of checkout - including your info, your recipient's, and the gift message you want to include - before you're told how much the delivery cost will be. On the Premier Chocolate Overload Layer Cake we picked, the "shipping and processing" fee came out to be $20. That's pretty standard for shipping a whole cake across the country, but we'd like it if Send a Cake made that more obvious upfront (since we found a few complaints from customers who felt like they wound up paying way more than they had expected by the time they checked out).

They're not the bakery

We have some concerns of our own when it comes to Send a Cake. Those first popped up when we noticed a striking similarity between the photos here and the ones on the site of another cake retailer on our list - David's Cookies. We're talking "the exact same images". When we reached out to Send a Cake via email - who responded within the hour, which was impressive - they confirmed that David's Cookies is where their cakes come from. Essentially, Send a Cake is just a storefront serving treats from David's Cookies. But there is zero mention of that on the Send a Cake website.

Not transparent enough

From there, it moves from sins of omission (never mentioning that they're not making their own treats) to ones of commission. On the Send a Cake website, their "About Us" page says that their products are shipped from their offices in Seattle. However, the email from their representative admitted that "the actual cakes come from the Jersey store".

BBB isn't impressed

We're not the only ones who raise a skeptical eyebrow in Send a Cake's direction. The Better Business Bureau gives the company an "F" rating for failing to respond to 27 of the 60 complaints filed against them. The reviews left on the BBB site aren't encouraging either, averaging just 1.5 out of 5 stars across nearly 50 ratings. One of the most disturbing ones we read there was from a customer trying to send a cake for what might have been her grandfather's last birthday: Send a Cake said the treat had been delivered when nothing ever arrived; if it hadn't been for the customer's purchasing additional insurance through Route, she wouldn't have been given a refund (and her grandpa still didn't get anything for his 83rd birthday...).

Still has hundreds of thousands of 5-star reviews

On the other hand, Send a Cake has a staggering 147,000 reviews on Trustpilot, and over 110,000 of them are five stars. Most of those glowing reviews are from customers who didn't go for the large cakes but rather the mini cakes in a surprise box that shoots out confetti and other decorations. Those seem to be a huge hit (although we can't confirm where the little cakes are coming from: David's Cookies or somewhere else?), and lots of people are delighted by being able to put the contents back into the box and make it "explode" all over again.

Honesty would move them higher on our list

We're not quite sure what we think about Send a Cake. It's hard for us to wholeheartedly recommend any company that isn't 100% transparent about how they're doing business, especially when they're using a big-name competitor's products and putting them out there as their own (while charging $2 to $10 more for them). And yet, over 100K 5-star reviews isn't anything we can easily overlook. All of that combines to earn Send a Cake a slightly below average rating from us, with the potential for that to improve if they ever pull back the curtain and make it clear that they're in partnership with David's Cookies for at least some of their cakes.

Learn More  ➜

On the Send a Cake website