Ebuyer Suck

By | 12th September 2005

The saga of ebuyer is a long and bitter one.

I placed an order for a Seagate Barracuda 80Gb 7200rpm UDMA100 Hard Drive from ebuyer on Sunday 14th August for deliver BY Thursday 18th August. It did not arrive on the 18th and when I tried to phone customer services at 16.35 I was put on hold for 10 minutes and then disconnected. I tried to phone again at 16.50 and was unable to even get put on hold.

I then phoned customer services at around 9am on Friday 19th August. I was told that it was going to be sent to City Link that evening for delivery on Saturday. It did not arrive on Saturday.

I was then unable to make any kind of contact with Customer Services all the following week (22nd – 25th August). Sometimes I would get as far as being told that all the lines were busy and to please try again later, sometimes not even that before I was disconnected. I did not bother to send an eNote, as the site said that there was a 7 day turnaround on them.

City Link eventually tried to deliver my order on Thursday 25th August. One full week after it should have been delivered. There was nobody available to receive the package so it was finally successfully delivered on Friday 26th August. Hannah took delivery, and informed me that it had been delivered. I was annoyed that it had taken so long, but relieved that it had finally arrived.

Imagine my irritation, then, when I returned home. I opened the package and discovered that I had not received a Seagate Barracuda 80Gb hard drive as ordered, I had received a Seagate ST92011A 20GB 2mb Cache 2.5ins 5400rpm Notebook Drive.

I sent ebuyer an eNote (the only reasonably reliable way of contacting them) to tell them all of this, and after a while was told to file an RMA request online. I had tried to do that already and their website failed to work. They had to create the RMA request for me and then I had to fill in the details. After another delay, it was authorised and I toddled off to the Post Office to send it back. I included the receipt for the postage as requested and waited.

4 days after they received it, I was informed that they had set in motion a refund to my debit card. However, they’d only credited the purchase price of the disk and not the original delivery cost, nor the postage costs incurred by returning it (which was listed on the receipt I’d sent them).

Today, they’ve finally managed to refund those, too (plus the 80p I quoted for a jiffy bag).

So, nearly a month later, I have no disk. I don’t have the money back yet, either, due to the inefficiencies of British banking (a subject for an entirely different rant) and I have to find another supplier.

Ebuyer, you’ve just lost a customer. Your customer service is diabolical and your website leaves a lot to be desired. For example (a small thing, but nevertheless annoying), you provide a “remember me” checkbox on login, but it doesn’t persist. If I refresh a page, or navigate to a new page when my login has expired, you don’t remember the page I was heading for when I have reconfirmed my details. It’s all very frustrating and we hatessssssssss you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.