Should I Be Worrying? Eclipse Computers

[Fornowagain]

Are these guys that bad, bought a cpu says 'normally in stock'. Big mistake?

[thejimbo]

Ordered once from them and never again. Not the most reliable company shall I say. Was a long time ago so can't remember if it was a faulty part I got and it took ages to sort out or it was a long delay but I decided to avoid them at all costs

[Fornowagain]

Turns out it was a big mistake, they had no stock even when it said they had. Meh, I've handed it over to Visa to make sure the refund is forthcoming.

[arizonagroove]

Things that bug me about Eclipse:

- Nearly everything on their website is listed as 'normally in stock'. WTF use is that?

- Prices in store are higher than on their website. I once asked why and was told 'the website has lower overheads'. I pointed out that stuff ordered online is shipped from the warehouse at the back of the store, the exact same place where the sales guy goes to fetch anything you buy in store. The guy just kinda shrugged.

- Their service is so slow. So so slow. When you eventually get to the counter and say what you want the guy disappears to the warehouse and gets it. This can take a surprisingly long time. Then he rings it up. computer. Then you pay for it. Then he takes it out back again to 'scan it out of the system'. This too can take a surprisingly long time. Apparently no one has thought of connecting the point of sale system to the stock control system.

- One of the sales guys once asked me 'Is IEEE1394 the same as Firewire then?'. (This after he told me they didn't sell Firewire harddisk enclosures because he was looking at their website where it says IEEE1394.)

- They want to know who you are, even if you're paying in cash. This is because 'we have to put a name on the invoice'. My name is Bob Smith.

- I've known several people who've worked there at various times. None of them had anything good to say about it.

[wja96]

- Prices in store are higher than on their website. I once asked why and was told 'the website has lower overheads'. I pointed out that stuff ordered online is shipped from the warehouse at the back of the store, the exact same place where the sales guy goes to fetch anything you buy in store. The guy just kinda shrugged.

The prices are the same on-line and in-store now. They do surcharge Credit Cards though.

- Their service is so slow. So so slow. When you eventually get to the counter and say what you want the guy disappears to the warehouse and gets it. This can take a surprisingly long time. Then he rings it up. computer. Then you pay for it. Then he takes it out back again to 'scan it out of the system'. This too can take a surprisingly long time. Apparently no one has thought of connecting the point of sale system to the stock control system.

Basically, they don't have a stock-control system so they have to go and physically find it before taking your money. This is pretty poor. If they had a working stock system they could probably process 3 or 4 times as many customers.

- One of the sales guys once asked me 'Is IEEE1394 the same as Firewire then?'. (This after he told me they didn't sell Firewire harddisk enclosures because he was looking at their website where it says IEEE1394.)

There are good, bad and indifferent sales people there, but on the whole I think they are better than PC World.

- They want to know who you are, even if you're paying in cash. This is because 'we have to put a name on the invoice'. My name is Bob Smith.

Again, I bought a motherboard for cash there last week and they did not ask for any details at all.

- I've known several people who've worked there at various times. None of them had anything good to say about it.

I've worked for various famous multi-nationals and I wouldn't recommend the experience either. It tends to be that unhappy people leave.

I only buy in-store and it's about a 2-hour drive from home (I travel up the M6 a lot) so I cannot comment on their on-line customer service but I now have a pretty reasonable relationship with the fatter of the two guys on the Returns desk, but that's only after convincing him that I had a better working knowledge of retail sales legislation than he did. Once he accepted that he had to fix things, or offer me a refund if it didn't work etc. etc. we got on famously. The Asian guy (ASEAN rather than Indian-Asian) does know what he's talking about and he has repeatedly steered me onto better kit than I would have bought, saving me money at least twice.

[Kord]

I can only comment on their online service, and it seems poor.

I've placed 2 orders with them. Primarily to get 2 of these i-Cage enclosures... first time, the order was delayed and then cancelled... second time was on July 19, and I've heard nothing since then.

And yeah, I have to agree with that comment about "Usually in Stock" status. I first placed an order with Eclipse because I thought they most likely had everything ready to go. It obviously means nothing since I was told roughly half the items I had ordered were out of stock, and they were waiting on them.

[Fornowagain]

Coming up on a week after I canceled and still no refund on my account

Must be in the system, yeah ok.

[arizonagroove]

I dropped in there the other day to see what monitors they had on display and made a note of some of the prices to compare when I got home. Prices in store do indeed now appear to the same as on the website. Very good to see.

[mart_haj86]

They want to know who you are, even if you're paying in cash. This is because 'we have to put a name on the invoice'. My name is Bob Smith.

This can be very handy sometimes, I have found (worked in a computer shop for 3 years) It can really help with RMAs as all purchases you make are recorded in the system making it a little more fool proof.

[Fornowagain]

Rang again today a week after cancelling an order to ask where my refund was,

"Hello I'd like to enquire about a refund on order *******"

"Sorry sir this has just gone through today"

"Today?"

"yes sir"

"Why has it taken 5 working days for you to refund a card, after several phone calls and conformations from yourselves both verbal and written that the refund is automatic and complete?"

"I don't know sir, very strange"

"Can you give me the conformation code?"

"Errr??, one minute" This is where they hopefully actually refunded that card

"The number code is *****"

"So you're 100% sure the refund has gone through?"

"Yes sir"

Well at least they were polite

[wobbly]

I ordered an Asus 8800GT video card from them on the 31st of October and paid for next day delivery as ait was appaernetly in stock. Its now the 17th of November and after numerous attempts to contact them via e-mail, along with delivery and read receipts sent, I have come to the conclusion that thise company are a bunch of cowboys. I got the order confirmation telling me that they had billen my card but thats the last time I heard from them.

I can understand that things may be out of stock etc but a good business looks after its customers and keeps them informed. Alas, it seems that these bunch of idiots couldn't care less about their customers as long as the wonga is in their bank account.

[Parp]

My friend orderded a CPU from them a few years ago, when it arrived the CPU was dead so he asked for a replacement. They told him they would not replace it (I can't remember the reason they gave but they should have replaced it). He ended up going to see a lawyer who got in contact with eclipse, they refunded him straight away after that.
Luckily the lawyer didn't cost him anything (Must have been legal aid or something).

My advice, wait and order from a reputable firm like Scan.

[covbloke]

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!

[bnorth99]

I've also had a less than 100% experience with Eclipse

I bought the top-rated budget computer at the end of last year (the Eclipse Elite i675n86gt, obviously before reading consumer reviews) and have had a problem with a red tint on monitor since it arrived.

Under advice I have changed the chipset under BIOS to point to the graphics card on the motherboard - by changing from BIOS chipset option 'primary display adapter' from "PCI" to "onboard" and plugged the VGA cable into the motherboard.

This has fixed the problem or at least provided a workaround.

Also since the graphics card is actually PCI-EXPRESS and the BIOS was initially set to PCI I tried changing the 'primary display adapter' to PCI-EXPRESS but to my surprise this didn't fix the problem.

I could live with not having my £50 graphics card as Eclipse say: "you would need to return the system back to us at your own expense, to which, providing the warranty seals have not been tampered with ...."

unfortunately I now have a BIG complication - as of yesterday I ejected the DVD tray and its now stuck !! in the "out" position. So it would be v hard to post it with its tray out ... and getting a
(wo)man to fix it would invalidate the warranty ???!!!!

any advice on trading standards/ sale of good act/ stuck DVD trays would be much appreciated (seen tips on web for dealing with DVD trays jammed in - but not out)

[wombar]

Sounds like the Eclipse that I dealt with a few years ago, nice to see they still haven't changed. The fact that the system arrived faulty and that they told you to use the onboard graphics instead of a dedicated card you paid for just goes to show what kind of service you can expect from them. They really should have offered to pick up the machine at their expense rather than telling you to return it at your expense.

How long is the warranty for?

Personally, if it were me, I'd be inclined to just get a friend who knows about PCs to simply replace the DVD drive (they're only about £20) and assume that the warranty is probably going to be useless if you need it anyway. You just know they'll have the machine for weeks at a time if you return it for repair.

Replacing a DVD drive is pretty straight forward, even for someone who doesn't know much about PCs. Of course this leaves you without a warranty potentially so you'd need to make your own call on that.

The sale of goods act says that goods must be fit for purpose and free from defects, which your system clearly isn't. I'd be inclined to call Eclipse (if they'll talk to you) and insist they pick it up and fix the drive and graphics card that was faulty on delivery. There's no point going to TS before you've tried to talk to Eclipse because they'll just ask you to talk to Eclipse first.

How did you pay for it? If you paid via CC, it might be worth talking to your card company and see if they can offer any help.

I must admit I'm amazed that a company like that is still in business. I returned some stuff there are few years ago, and their returns dept is always full of angry people who have had to go in person because they can't get through on the phone.

[jeffel]

Hi i have purchased twice from thier shop and ended up asking for a refund. i will suggest u to ask for a refund asap and order the item from elsewhere.They havent got any items listed on thier site.U have to email them before u buy an item and wait almost 2 days for replies like "hi ***** we are sorry to inform u that the item is currently not in stock.We are expecting some in a few days"blah blah blah.Even though the component might cost a bit more elsewhere stay away from Eclipse.thx