Where not to buy on-line

OK, it’s not as bad as it seems, but I’m talking about poor service rather than being anything more criminal.

Don’t bother trying to buy anything on-line from Dixons/Currys/PC World their service is awful, probably due in part to their IT infrastructure.

Firstly, the whole group are pretty well guaranteed to sell at the highest price you can find. Well, you knew that already. However, if they’re the only place with the item in stock you have little choice.

Secondly, their standard delivery time is a minimum of 5 working days (yes, they don’t state a maximum time). If you pay a great deal for delivery you can get that down to 3 days, officially, but from the rest of my experience I’d probably not believe it.

Thirdly, they charge your credit card at the time you order, not when they dispatch. I ordered a Nikon D200 camera body at lunchtime on Thursday, they debitted my card immediately.

Fourthly, their internal mail system is truely awful. The two confirmation e-mails I’ve had so far each took between 16 and 20 hours to get out of their Lotus mail server and on to their external mail hub. That’s an unacceptable service level for a mail system used for customer services.

Finally, their web site is broken. Or rather the authentication is partly broken. The password I gave my account there was strong, it contained both upper and lower case alphabetic characters and numeric ones. It works with the login page but all subsiquent password prompts (which you need to use to do ANYTHING else after that won’t accept that same password. I’m guessing that the web developer’s code is lowercasing the input before doing the password check or the password is being truncated.

So, what’s the situation with my order now? Well, the money’s been taken and it’s still “Being processed” and has been since Thursday evening. You have to wonder how they get return custom.. or maybe they don’t, which is why the PC World adverts are telling people to use the website as merely a catalogue before going to the shop.

Well, I for one won’t be buying from the Dixons Group on-line again.