Why Dont You Blog?

Now, in the past I have been very quick to rant here about the slightest customer service infraction - mainly this is because Ebuyer and Pipex are terminally bad companies - so it is only fair that I try to re-dress the balance at least occasionally.

So, with this in mind, I need to say a big well done to Amazon.co.uk. They have an actual understanding about customer service and appear able to maintain their promises.

A few months ago I was sent £20 in Amazon vouchers, so eventually I decided to spend them. Not really having anything in mind, I spent quite a while searching Amazon looking for the right combination of things to hit the £20 mark exactly and not incur any P&P charges (yes, I am that cheapskate). Eventually I found some filters for my camera so I ordered them. Everything went smoothly and the order was processed then confirmed.

A few hours later I glanced over the confirmation email and, to my horror, I realised I’d ordered the wrong size filter (52mm instead of 67mm if anyone cares) and panicked trying to cancel the order. In previous dealings with e-commerce sites, this is normally where everything goes wrong, however with Amazon it was painless, quick and effective. They were even able to refund the gift voucher without any problems at all.

Being unable to find any suitable filters of the correct size, I cracked and bought a few books (history, Pratchett and the like), going over the £20 but not by much. As I live a few miles more remote than the middle of nowhere, I was expecting the delivery charges for this (heavier) bundle to be painful. When I have bought from other suppliers (who also use Royal Mail to deliver) postage charges have been astronomical but no, Amazon offered the normal range of options, including the free “standard delivery.”

Despite the site being littered with warnings about the Royal Mail strikes causing problems to post etc., I decided I was in no hurry and standard delivery (estimated 5-7 days) would be fine. This was during the evening of 10 Oct 07. I placed the order, got all the confirmations (and this time there was no panic over the thread sizes…) and all was well.

Today (13 Oct 07), I get home from work only to discover the parcel has arrived. So, in effect, the standard delivery took less than 3 days to complete. To be honest, this is pretty good going. If some one posts me a single page of A4 it normally takes that much time to get here, if not longer. When I have ordered from other companies, I have had to pay a fortune (often as much as 20% of the cost of the total order) for items which have taken a week or two to get here from the centre of England.

I realise it is strange to say well done to a company for doing what they should do (i.e. serve their customers), but sadly it has become a rare thing in my experience. Companies no longer care about negative opinions, because largely they are all rubbish. In this instance though, Amazon have exceeded my expectations and, in doing so, have greatly increased the chances I will shop there again. Will they care? I doubt it. But I will.

(Note 1: Interestingly, in this instance, Amazon exceeded my expectations by ensuring they were low to begin with. Amazon emphasised how the parcel could take up to a week, longer with the postal strikes. This meant anything less was a bonus to me. Too many e-commerce organisations try to boast about getting things to you before you even realised you wanted them that disappointment is sure to follow.)

(Note 2: One negative point. Despite the books being supposedly “brand new” all four show distinct signs of wear. One is pretty dog eared and all smell of stale tobacco. If I was planning to sell these on eBay, I would never get away with calling them new… The parcel used to wrap the four up was open at both ends, so I am amazed nothing fell out and was lost. I think this includes a well done to the local postie. )

[tags]Amazon, e-commerce, society, culture, raves, Good Shop, Postal Strikes, Royal Mail, Books, Shopping, eBay, eBuyer, Pipex, Customer Service[/tags]

Popularity: 35% [?]

Popularity: 35% [?]

Well, first off, I was wrong when I worried about Ebuyer getting my goods to me, they actually arrived today. Fortunately, I had relied more on City Link’s claims of when the goods would be delivered than Ebuyers and was able to accept the delivery.

Oddly, even though Ebuyer claimed the shipment would only be two thirds of the goods, all arrived at the same time. I wonder if Ebuyer are aware of this… Overall, this is not a “well done” to Ebuyer, I am relived the things arrived but the almost random scheduling is still annoying. I hope it never comes down to a case of me singing a company’s praise simply because they managed to do what I paid them hundreds of pounds to do…

Also, especially pertinent since my local authority now only collects household waste every two weeks, the amount of packaging used was outrageous. Seriously. I even took some pictures (one of the items was a new memory card so I had to try it out) to prove my point.

I have put some household items around it so you can get an idea of the size. It is a big box. You would think it held something really big, or really fragile.

As you can see, the sole contents of this box were FIVE DVD-RW disks. Yes, only five. All that packaging for five disks. Amazing really. The memory card was a bit different as it came in a plastic envelope - much more in proportion. I wonder if I can make Ebuyer pay for the extra costs involved in getting rid of that carboard and the plastic padding that was inside (doesn’t photo very well, so I excluded most of it). Anyway, I am still going to think of Ebuyer as a bad shop for a while longer…

[tags]Waste, Environment, Bad Shops, eBuyer, Google Checkout, Rant, Shops, Society, Technology[/tags]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Rant time. Recently, I was foolish and naive enough to ignore my previously imposed ban on using Ebuyer and I bought some new tech from them. Stupidly, I assumed the problems I had with them (over a year ago now) would be a thing of the past and, as an “Online” company they would have everything sorted.

Yes, I am stupid.

I made the order last week (oddly using google checkout to pay, but that is another tale), and the first warning signs popped up when I had two confirmatory messages from Ebuyer with different delivery dates (tomorrow and wednesday…). Today, I had the “Your Order Has Been Shipped” email from both Ebuyer and Google Checkout. The message from Ebuyer only lists two of the three items I have bought (even though everything was in stock when I ordered and when I just checked the missing item again, it is still in stock…) and says delivery will be on Wednesday. At the same time I got an email from Google Checkout saying Ebuyer had shipped the order and it would be delivered on Tuesday (tomorrow). Sheer brilliance.

Both messages had a “check your order” link where I could go to Ebuyer and see what the delivery date is. When I followed the link, I was presented with a log on screen. Not having any log on details, I asked them to send me some to the email address Ebuyer had associated with the order. When they sent me the password, I logged in only to find there were no pending orders and no shipped orders.

Amazing. Just like last time, I am here with no real idea of when the order will be delivered and if the whole order will arrive. Despite being an e-commerce company, Ebuyer’s website is no use at all. Google are slightly more use, their email contained a link to check the tracking number on City Link, however the link from google reads: (I have replaced by order number with a place holder)

Track Other package No. City Link - [order number]

Which gets a “your search returned no matches” result from Google. Wonderful.  I have checked with City Link and it seems they think the order will be delivered tomorrow, so I suppose I will have to assume that is the correct one and wait in for it. It does make me wonder what the point in arranging a delivery date when you order is, if for what ever reason, I hadn’t check my email in time to take tomorrow off, I would have been stuck. Last time, Ebuyer showed it had no interest in customer retention after this happened - not even a “sorry for the confusion.” I suspect that, again, this will involve several days off work as each item arrives at random intervals. Bah. I hope I learn soon.

[tags]Ebuyer, bad shops, bad customer service, Google Checkout, Rant, Technology, Shops[/tags]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

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.

Now, 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]

Popularity: 43% [?]

Popularity: 43% [?]

Well to get the ball rolling on Bad Shops, I thought I would address the issues I had shopping with Ebuyer last September. Without going into too much detail for a first post, and I have bought from them quite a few times in the past, this last order was enough to ensure that, no matter what the potential savings, I wont shop there again.

Basically, I made an order for a 32″ LCD TV, a new graphics card, some mini-SD Memory and DVD blanks. Nice and simple. After I made the order I was sent an email from their customer services saying the order had failed (no particular reason) and could I try again. I duly recreated the order and this time it was successful. Too successful. Upon checking my account page, it appeared both orders had cleared and I was going to get two televisions. Wonderful.

I raised an “eNote” (this is a cumbersome system) which had little effect and I was informed by the system it could take up to 10 days to process the eNote - while the deliveries were going to take place in 5 days. Not wishing to be billed twice, I eventually called customer services and eventually got one order cancelled. At this point, while it was annoying that the eBuyer customer fulfilment software was erratic, it was not a major problem. Now for the rest of my rant, this was before expensive orders had free delivery, I had paid extra for the delivery to be within 5 days.
The next day I got an email informing me that my order would be delivered on (cant remember the exact date), which was the Friday that week (the fifth day). As the delivery windows are an entire day, I had to take a day off work. As you can imagine, nothing was delivered. I phoned customer services at 1500 hours only to be told deliveries can be as late as 1800. At 1830 I phoned up to be informed that my order was never going to be shipped anyway as payment had not yet cleared. Obviously dismayed that I had taken a day off work for a shipment which was never going to arrive the customer services assistant bore the brunt of some ire. As the customer services close at 1900, this was never fully resolved and I was informed i would be contacted by eNote with a new delivery date over the weekend.

On Sunday evening I received an eNote telling me the delivery would be on Monday. Lots of notice, but I managed to negotiate a short notice day off work. On Monday, 1800 rolled round and no delivery. Once again I phoned customer services who informed me that no delivery had been scheduled but it would be sent on Tuesday. Obviously at 1800 on a Monday there was no way I could get the time off, but fortunately my wife would be available to collect it.

Now by some miracle at lunchtime on Tuesday a delivery arrived. It was the graphics card. Nothing else. Once more, after work I called customer services to be informed that there had been a problem and the other items would be shipped separately. When I asked when I could expect them, no answer was forthcoming.

On the Wednesday the TV and the mini-SD arrived. Without any warning, other than an eNote sent to me one hour before the delivery informing me it was on the way. Fortunately my neighbours were able to take the delivery which prevented the farce escalating. Still no DVD blanks and now I was informed eBuyer was out of stock of them. Shocking.

Sheer bloody mindedness stopped me cancelling the order, and they duly arrived two weeks later - actually on the day the relevant eNote stated.

After complaining repeatedly to eBuyer by email, eNote and telephone to no avail, I wrote a ranting letter of complaint. The reply was the under their terms and conditions eBuyer do not compensate for any inconveience caused etc., etc., and the best they could offer was to refund the delivery charge. (about £10)

As a result of eBuyers dismal order fulfilment system I lost three days pay waiting for that order which, in the end, took nearly three weeks to deliver. This easily wiped out any savings I may have made based on their prices. As eBuyer is an online retailer, being able to deliver the goods the customer orders when promised is vital. It is probably the single most important part of maintaining customer loyalty and getting a brand recommended by word of mouth. In the past, I have recommended eBuyer. As you may guess, not only will I no longer EVER buy from them again, I would not recommend any one else did and actively advise people to shop elsewhere.

In the great scheme of things, I am only one person and my impact on their business is limited. If the balance of people like their service they will do well. Personally, I find paying slightly more (such as when I bought my new digital camera, it was £30 more but delivered free and exactly when said within a 2 hour time frame) for better customer service is more than worth it.

There may come the day that this blog has a section about which retailers we do recommend. If that happens I will let you know which companies have certainly come through with the goods

Popularity: 20% [?]

Popularity: 20% [?]