Ahh, online shopping. How cool is it? Well with all of the advantages from price comparison to options most people forget about the downside. My recent experience with a online retailer called BabyAge is a great example.
For xmas, my wife and I budget things out and usually split the money on the kids. This year I was going to by our daughter a kitchen playset. I read a bunch of reviews and decided on a model. I found a good price on Amazon and I purchased it. Amazon allows others to have storefronts within Amazon to help distribute the cost of operations and broaden it's product range. When I bought the playset, it was from the BabyAge storefront within Amazon. I grabbed a couple other items to go with it, checked out and paid. I took a closer look at the bill and realized I had an extra item in there I didn't want. I followed the instructions from Amazon on how to cancel an item in an order which was in this case, was to email a specific email address with BabyAge.
I made this purchase on a Sunday night and placed the order to cancel the ONE item we didn't want within 5 minutes of the original order. On Monday morning I get a mail from BabyAge stating that because Amazon lagged, they couldn't cancel the order. Huh? If Amazon was lagging with the order and I sent a mail directly to BabyAge, wouldn't that make it easier to cancel the order?
Basically I ask the retailer if I have any rights to make a cancellation and they state I have within an hour to cancel but I have to follow the instructions that Amazon gives me. (well the instructions were to email BabyAge which I did) I said well if you aren't going to work with me, then I want to cancel the entire order. BabyAge responds with: if you cancel or refuse the order we will levy a restocking fee of some amount. At this point I have about had it and read the shipping policies for babyage and amazon and called bullshit. You can't enforce fees that aren't called out in policy. Especially when you are under an umbrella policy from Amazon. I ended up making a complaint to Amazon about the vendor. Amazon responded and said they would take care of shipping and the resolution but my goodness, what a pain. Online shopping is great, but you sure have to watch out for vendors like BabyAge. If this was a real life store front this would never of happened. The worst you might get is the clerk rolling their eyes at you for causing them more work. In this case you have a vendor selling baby products trying to take advantage of consumers by hiding behind process and email. You look at their website and you see a big warehouse of things yet the customer service rep who fielded my original request to cancel one item was listed as the principal for the company.
BTW - searching the BBB record on BabyAge returns about 6 complaints a month for them. When I asked them about this, they were proud of their record because they have such a high volume of sales. Wow, some people just don't get it.
