Buying from the Bad

A while ago, the customer service of ebuyer infuriated me to the extent that we went about creating a new category here (bad shops) and I genuinely intended to never buy from them again. Sadly, market forces have worked against me and I find myself about to make another purchase from the customer service vortex that is ebuyer.

Recently I have discovered that I need to get a DVD-Recorder. This is OK, because they are reasonably cheap now – Tesco’s sells Liteon models for under GB£70. As I was looking through the shops, considering which model to get (I want one which has built in DivX for example), I found Sainsburys sells a DVD-recorder which is DivX and has an 80gb HDD for £130. How can you turn that down? I went home and checked online to see if there were any other deals and, blast,Evil ebuyer do a Liteon DVD-recorder with a 160gb HDD for £124. Blast and double blast. It is hard to mentally justify spending the same amount of money for a machine with half the capacity, so another order with ebuyer was put together. I hate myself for it.

Comically, ebuyer seem to have done everything in their power to stop people purchasing products there. The DVD Recorder I want to get is the Liteon HDA740GX which I have seen in Currys for £182 and on Froogle should cost over £156. It is, from what I have read, a good model. Most shops (eg, PC World) sell the 80GB version for the price eBuyer is asking for the 160GB monster. Ebuyer, being cheaper than anyone else I can find by a fair amount, get the order. Blast, double blast and triple blast.

eBuyer Screen Shot - taken 14 Jun 07Now, the strange thing about ebuyer is when you try to navigate back to the product page you come across this conflicting bit of information. If you look at the second and third entries there you can see what I mean! (screen capped in case they ever fix it… 🙂 )

For some reason, the e-commerce site returns two identical products with different prices. One version, with a manufacturers part number of H DA740GX is going for the reasonable price of £124.5, but should you be foolish enough to buy the HD A740GX you will have to fork out £202.93. As far as I can see (with admittedly only a basic search for the manufacturers details), these are identical products.

Hopefully ebuyer will manage to deliver this to me by Wednesday as they have promised (and I had to pay for, as they don’t deliver for free to the remote places in the UK) otherwise I will have to resort to my somewhat impotent ranting against them and boycott them again (until I need a new tech order…)

On the e-commerce front, it isn’t just ebuyer which is insane. I was in PC World today (in the real world shop) and I saw a Belkin WiFi Phone which looked interesting, but there were no prices on it in the shop. Basically, this is a phone that connects to your Skype account via a wireless connection to your router. So, no need to have your PC on to use Skype which overcomes the main hurdle I have to using this wonderful service. Now, to prove this product exists you can look at it on the Dell site (which seems the cheapest) or on Froogle. It is real. It is what I wanted and it was in the shop I visited – they had dozens and it looked like they had been there for ages.

On the PCWorld website, however, can you find one? No. I tried searches for “Belkin Wifi” “Belkin Wireless” and even “Belkin.” At best I got a list of cables and network cards. No signs at all of the phone. Crazy.

Still, Dell sell it, so anyone reading this and looking for a present to buy me – consider it!

[tags]Bad Shops, Ebuyer, PCworld, Dell, E-commerce, Technology, Customer Service, Shops, Society, Froogle, Skype, Belkin, WiFi, Wireless, Telephony, Phone, LiteOn, DivX, Tescos, VoIP, Sainsburys, Currys[/tags]

2 thoughts on “Buying from the Bad

  1. By the way, before anyone comments: I have (since posting this) read a few reviews on the Belkin Phone and no longer think it is worth the money.

    If you really want to buy me a present (for example to show appreciation for such a wonderful blog) then a Nikon D80 will do fine…

  2. Pingback: Why Dont You Blog? » I should have known better

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