Originally Posted by analogueaddict 
Hi,
Made the mistake of buying a complete PC from these guys at the end of last year for a friend of mine who is a novice. They seemed to offer a good deal, initially promised delivery in 10 days, after 7 days received an e-mail stating that due to an unexpected volume of orders the maching would be delayed another 14 days, decided to wait, after 16 days and still no PC I phoned them up and was promised the machine later that week, it duly turned up on a Friday afternoon and was DOA. I phoned them up that afternoon and was told there was no one there to help, to call back Monday. After waiting all weekend I called on Monday, was kept waiting on the phone almost 30 minutes, then after running through some basic diagnostics stuff was told the whole machine would have to be returned, would need to be checked (which would take upto 14 days) and only then would the machine be repaired or replaced. Needless to say, I hit the roof, demanded I speak to a manager immediately, and being lied to that no manager was available, after threatning to contact their local trading standards office, they miraculously found a manager, who told me I was being unreasonable expecting my machine to be proritised over others. After a protracted conversation where I explained their staffing problems were not my problem, my solicitors and the trading standards were, however, their problem, they managed to prioritise my machine and get it turned around in 5 days.
Thankfully the machine eventually worked, but their service department is an absolute joke, it's almost as bad as Sky, I will NEVER do business with this company again for any reason.
Deal with at your peril!
Dave
Yep, I had very similar experience with Eclipse Coventry. Ordered a full PC, they said it would be 5-7 days. Took over a month due to 'heavy demand'. If I had known that I would have ordered elsewhere. This appears to be a standard Eclipse lie. Long waits on the phone and lies about the presence of the manager were also experienced.
Their website was also faulty. Their 'pc builder' offered two types of cooling to add to the intel pc I was building. Apparently it was my fault that the model number I picked out of the two they offered was actually an AMD one, even though their website had not mentioned AMD. When I got them to correct this (adding £15 to the price of the PC) they said they would build the machine over the next two days. A week later I phoned up and was told that there was a holdup with the memory because I had picked a type they do not normally hold in stock. Again they told me this delay was my fault because I had not picked a different brand from the three that their website offered for this motherboard. Anothe £12 on the purchase price as I said (in desperation) that I would accept any branded compatible memory they DID have in stock.
When I finally got the machine ti had two serious hardware faults. Their tech support staff repeatedly threatened to charge me to look at this, quite happily ignoring my rights under the Sale of Goods act. (For crying out loud the PC had been in my posession 24 hours and they wanted to charge me for them to fix faulty goods even though the PC still had all security seals intact.)
I had to read up on the law, study their terms and conditions and calmly point out to them that their actions were contravening the sale of goods act, identifying which clauses. I had to take someone along as a witness, asfter the first time I saw them lying to other customers, and say two seperate guys storming out of the shop furious. I observed they had turned up the instore music quite loud so other customers could not hear the complaints. I have a hearing impairment, and struggled to communicate over the store music.
After a further 3 weeks without a PC while they investigated, finally ackonwledged one of the hardware faults (but deleted any sentence from my emails referring to the second fault whenever they replied and totally ignored that) I finally presuaded them to remove the faulty sound card and refund just the price of that. I needed the PC for work and was very upset at their aggressive staff even though I had been polite and helpful the whole time. (This may have been my mistake, being too calm and polite in the face of abrupt, unhelpful staff)
Of course when they finally admitted that after all this time they had not fixed the faulty sound card and did not know what was causing the problem, they did everything possible to make me accept a credit note rather than refund the money to my credit card. The guy behidn the counter suddenlt tensed up, lowered his voice and asked me who had given me permission to have a cash refund. This was intimidating. I named their customer services manager. The counter guy went away for 10 minutes leaving a queue of other people at the faulty goods counter behind me getting cross before he came back and said that the refund would be OK. Of course he could not process the refund himself. He gave me a piece of paper and I had another 20 minute wait in the queue for the till on the other counter before I was able to go home tired and stressed out.
Eclipse never did acknowledge or fix the second fault even though I can duplicate it on demand, causing the machine to hard reboot within an hour of use, making the machine totally unsuiitable for work. It was an SLI problem. I cut my losses and removed the second graphics card, using it to build a new PC for my family so as not to lose the £150 the card had cost.
I wasted about two working days queueing in store and reading up on the law they were breaking. This plus the lost money and being without a working PC for 2 months, and having to contend with surly, aggressive counter staff means I would never use them again.
To sum up,
1. Eclipse customer service is the worst I have encountered in any shop ever.
2. Their website was faulty, obviously because their staff had entered incorrect details into the backend database, causing it to offer incompatible components - for which they blamed the customer.
3. Their marketing appears to have been a lie, deliberately stating delivery times they were never going to meet.
4. The goods they supplied were not of merchantable quality but they did everything possible to avoid their responsibilities under consumer law, using the threat of additional costs and the threat of refusing to return the PC to the customer as a weapon to scare customers from making warranty claims or returns under the Sale of Goods act.
5. I would never recommend Eclipse to a friend, because I want to keep my friends!