Ebuyer.com Silences Dissent

[halston]

Detailed below is the rather sad history to date of my relationship with this company.
It subdivides into two distinct but complimentary sections.
The first outlines the actual business deal between Ebuyer and me. The second deals with my attempt to communicate with their online forum community and the vicious response by their moderator ‘dagwoood’

Section 1; This was posted on Ebuyer’s forum



Dear all, having ordered a laser printer from this company and having received a response both confirming the order and informing me of the expected date of delivery I can only described what happened next as going pear shaped.
Catalogued below is the history and reason behind this question to anyone that, have any of you been treated by this company in this manner, if so how did you pursue it, if indeed you did, and what was the eventual outcome. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kindest regards
S. Halston



Tue, 12 Aug 2008

Dear halston,
Your order has been cancelled for one of the following reasons:

You have requested the order to be cancelled.
The item(s) you have ordered are no longer available or have been discontinued.
We apologise for any inconvenience. If you still require the order, please reorder the goods online.
Please note; if payment has been taken for your cancelled order, we will refund the money as soon as possible. The refund will take up to three working days to clear.

Kind regards,
Ebuyer Customer Support




Tue, 12 Aug 2008
Dear halston,

Many thanks for using our website for your customer service query. We are currently replying to all queries within 2 business days, please bear with us while we process your query.

A new eNote, number 1023374, has been raised, which reads:

Dear sir/ madam,
It is with great anger and disappointment that I pen this communiqué. On Friday the 8th of august I placed with you an order for a laser printer, your catalogue showing several in stock I placed the order in good faith. Having received on the same day a confirmation of both the receipt of my money and a confirmation of the expected date of delivery I naturally assumed that, as in the past when dealing with you, everything was fine.
However this has not proven to be the case, because on Mon, 11 Aug 2008 I received email from you stating that, “Unfortunately we were unaware of this stock discrepancy until your order went through to our warehouse to be dispatched” thereby supposedly and immediately making your systemic failure my problem, why is this?! It most certainly is not my problem. To add insult to injury when I rang you to find out just what had happened I was fobbed off with the excuse that the manager was not there to answer my questions but would most assuredly contact me by phone the next day to resolve this issue, But wait that didn’t happen did it? So when at last and in desperation I rang you I was informed that the printers were out of stock and my money would be refunded, again making this my problem. Understand this I placed an order, my money was accepted; this by anyone standards is a contract, a contract as far as I am concerned that is valid, you are in breach of it and are insisting, or rather the sales representative is insisting that there is nothing she can do about it, no offer of an alternative no offer of an accommodation, nothing. This shoddy way of treating people certainly does not echo your supposed “business philosophy” of giving “consumers and businesses what they want, when they want it. We never stop improving our world class operation by putting our customers - and their needs - first.”

I expect to receive an alternative to the printer advertised at the same price as the one originally ordered I further expect that your problems are not again made mine.

Halston
Account No …….




Wed, 13 Aug 2008
Dear halston,

We have replied to your eNote, number……., as follows :

Dear halston,
Thank you for your contact with our Customer Support Team.
We would firstly like to offer our most humble apologies for the annoyance and frustration which this matter has caused however as advised, unfortunately we were unaware of this stock discrepancy until your order went through to our warehouse to be dispatched.
As quoted in our terms an conditions, agreed to upon submission of an order, if after acceptance of your order we discover within 14 days of such acceptance that all of the goods are unavailable, we may terminate the contract and refund or re-credit you within 7 working days for any sum that has been paid by you or debited from your credit card for those goods. In accordance with this, a refund has been issued to you.

By way of a goodwill gesture, we have added a free shipping token to your account so that you can order an alternative if required. This will be used against the next order that is placed on a next day service and weighing up to 10kg.

Kind Regards

Sarah

Ebuyer Customer Support Team


Addendum for this forum, it should be remembered that had a seller on Ebay reneged on a deal like this they would have lost their account. It seems to me that Ebuyers terms and conditions boil down to nothing more than, if we wish to renege on a deal within 14 days we can and there’s nothing you can do about it, and if you should be cheeky enough to seek advice in our forum we will take it off line because we don’t like being criticised.

Any feedback to this post would be welcomed

Many thanks

Halston

[neonplanet40]

I dont see a problem to be honest. They had a stock discrepency which does happen now and again to such a big company. They cant send you what they dont have :/

They gave you a refund and a free delivery token as an act of good will. Whats the problem? :s

[Lucio]

They've done nothing wrong as far as I can see, except loose a couple of units of stock! Internet shopping on virtually any site is prone to this kind of error and their responses show that they're offering a modicom of goodwill by offering free carriage.

It's annoying but there's not a damn thing you can do about it, because they don't have the stock available and have T&C designed to protect them from mistakes in both stock levels and pricing errors.

I'd recomend that you watch the Scan interviews on Hexus.TV because ultimately I'd suspect the root cause of this is EDI stock holding, where the seller doesn't ever really own the stock that they sell, but that's speculation on my part.

[Jay]

Thats life

It has happened to us all, it takes time for stock levels to propagate to the website. Or it could be an EDI issue.

[TAKTAK]

i'm confused...

i can see where your coming from.. but ebuyer acted within their T&C's... so you have no comeback

i can see how it would be annoying... but it can't be helped sometimes...
atleast they gave you a gesture of goodwill....

[da_ging]

i too fail to see what the problem is here at least with what ebuyer have done, although it appears you may have had a rant in their forums and had it deleted

[TheAnimus]

Whats the problem, they thought they had stock and they didn't.

Now it sounds like they messed up in what should of been a perfect oppertunity to 'upsell' you to a more expensive/profitable item, but they didn't, they just automatically canceled your order. Yes this is bad business, but they will loose out from it, and if they are half decently run try and fix it (ie upsell).

you seam to of taken this rather badly. What can they do, they've not got stock! Their not legally obliged to give you something they can't. The best you could hope for is if a competitor has the item, at 'market price' to get it to you in time, you could sue them for loss of bargin. With ebuyer i nearly had to do this once, but thats another story altogether.

[badass]

I dont see a problem to be honest. They had a stock discrepency which does happen now and again to such a big company. They cant send you what they dont have :/

They gave you a refund and a free delivery token as an act of good will. Whats the problem? :s

My thoughts exactily. Be happy with what you have got. They are actually under no legal obligation to supply you with that printer, reagrdless of how you think contract law works.

[mnstar]

I've only had good experiences with ebuyer

[MadduckUK]

It is with great anger and disappointment that I pen this communiqué

You are a big posh sod with plums in your mouth

[dontasciime]

I've only had good experiences with ebuyer

Ebuyer are OK. They have issues like a lot of companies, I have ordered more than 300 items from them and only about 10 times have they messed things up. Like sending me a 256 meg mmc card instead of of 1 gig one and then insisting I send back the 256mb first before they send me out the 1 gig card I paid for.

Then sending me a socket Am2 CPU with my socket 775 motherboard only a slight mistake but hey they are only human (I suspect they have a lot of lead laden painted robots but cannot prove it)

[Betty_Swallocks]

Over reaction tbh. What did you want them to do? Go and buy one from somewhere else so that they could supply you?
Yes, it's inconvenient but flying off the handle at them isn't going to get you anywhere, unless you actually enjoy getting annoyed over little inconveniences in which case I am sorry. For you.

[moogle]

Addendum for this forum, it should be remembered that had a seller on Ebay reneged on a deal like this they would have lost their account.

No they'd just get some stick from the buyer through feedback... (unless eBay has changed it's rules again) which is what you're doing to eBuyer anyway.


Read Section 1.4 and 1.5 of this which you agreed to when you ordered. Did you read those? If they can't supply you a printer they can't supply it. You should be happy that they refund you your money more quicker than any other online retailers. The problem for some is that after they have their order cancelled they have to chase up the refund for some time.

It really isn't something big to complain about IMO, you should see the problems people have with other companies. (OcUK for example)

I've had the same thing happen to me too when I ordered a monitor and a case before, but it's nothing worth ranting about.

[Clunk]

Could be worse, you could have a collapsed groin.

[noTHINGface]

I suspect the OP is not going to be back here and I too can't see the problem, Ebuyer acted properly and professionally since they're not capable of materialising new printers out of thin air.

[MadduckUK]

i wonder what other forums he's signed up on just to post that.. and if he's getting a similar response?