Slipped discs

Posted on 30 Jun 2004 at 13:57

 

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101 damnations
Another site that has been useful for obtaining music CDs at a reasonable price is www.101cd.com. I had placed several orders successfully in the past and had no qualms about ordering 12 CDs at the end of January. They were all mainstream discs and none should have been hard to obtain. While ordering I noticed a new PayPal option and selected this as I had money in my account, but when the order went through a £1 PayPal fee had been added. This was strange because the company would have had to pay a surcharge had I opted to pay by credit card. Not happy with this, I emailed the company and it was quickly agreed that I would use my credit card.

The online order form showed that each item was expected shortly from 101CD's supplier. When I looked again in February the status column for each item was blank, so I emailed the company. I was told that the CDs were on order and that no delivery estimate was available. It was reassuring to note that my credit card had not been debited. There was no change by March, so I decided to cancel all but one of the CDs. The website doesn't allow you to do this yourself, but a member of staff did it for me and informed me by email the next day. The cancelled CDs were for birthdays that had since passed.

At the end of April I checked the website again, only to find that the remaining CD was no longer shown as either waiting or dispatched. I emailed the company and received this reply: "Due to a technical problem your order was not completed. This has now been rectified and your order has been placed with our suppliers and will be sendt [sic] shortly." The order was reinstated and the status column said "normally dispatched in 1-2 weeks". And that's where things stand at the time of writing. Since this episode began I've ordered a keenly priced DVD box set from 101CD that arrived within a few days. As emails are answered and a landline phone number is available means, I'm happy to continue ordering for now.

Just before Christmas a hot tip in a discussion group led me to pre-order a Dilbert box set from www.dvdconcept.com. My order was confirmed by email on 24th December. Another email arrived on 29th December and two more followed on 30th December. These were to update me on the status of the order, which alternated between Pre-Order and **Pre-Order**. That's how things remained. In the back of my mind I knew I was expecting to receive something Dilbert-related but I had to resort to the Outlook Find function to remind myself exactly what it was.

Towards the end of April I checked my order and found that there was no status information, even though the Dilbert box set was shown to have been released on 27th January. I decided to cancel the order by email. The cancellation advice came through quickly and again I hadn't been charged in advance, so I haven't been put off using this supplier.

The shipping news
It's clear that tremendous bargains can be found online. At the time of writing I'm eyeing up the box sets of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A quick look online revealed Amazon.co.uk to have the best prices at £39. Argos was charging £82, WH Smith £84 and Country Bookshop £85.

The main problem with online shopping appears to be the business practices of the vendors. Selling products that have to be ordered from suppliers is accepted practice in all types of commerce, but product descriptions should include realistic shipping times. There's no excuse why a currently available CD has not shipped five months after the customer has placed the order.