Bad Customer Service from Surplus Computers

Hooray,
Finally the correct memory showed up. Original order date, March 08, final delivery date, April 25th. I now have happy offspring.

 

It's alright, it took about 6 weeks for an order to go through with Overclockers UK for one of my friends (and all the items in it were completely destroyed when they arrived) which is why I avoid posting offers from them.

 

My main complaint has been the lack of communication, and the inability of them to even aknowledge there was a problem. Asking me to send a picture of it to prove it was the wrong item? But, that's life I guess.

 

My friend's deal with OcUK was thus:

Order product 4 days before going back to university, have it sent to home address.
Despite choosing next day delivery at large exense, order sits at shop for 3 days before getting shipped - arrives at home address after havig left for university.
Tells shop to collect delivery and send it to university address - only possible after a week's wait since parents were away. Despite clarifying the address was correct several times, only two of the 7 lines of the address given were given to the courier, so whilst the product made it to the depot near the university, they tried to deliver it every day for a week but failed because the address was missing all its info. Eventually he went down to the citylink depot after reading all this on the tracking page and collected it himself, the day before the goods were due to be sent back due to failed delivery. The delivery was comprised of three hard disks and a UPS - all of which were so damaged they were unusable.

A couple of weeks before a PC case that was part of a larger order from overclockers arrived a week after the other parts of the order. "Oh, the driver must have not collected it".

When a company operates like this, it's on my do-not-use list.

 

and yet bar one thing with me they hav been golden.

and i wouldnt blame them for the courier damaging the item. both scan and ebuyer use city link aswell, and citylink for me have been superb aswell.

so i got a DOA Bgrade P35C-DS3R from OcUK, and i called them up for a refund.

i sent i out on the same day (yesterday) and they emailed me they recived it this morning, and then another email telling me the refund was being proccessed.


superb from OcUK
so i got my full RMA refund hours after they recived it from OcUK. amazing!

then i bought a P5K-e and a freezer 7 pro from ebuyer, with their free 5 day delivery...and it came next day fantastic!

now orderd from scan, a sammy 320GB HDD with hexus free postage it took less than 24 hours to arrive.






eBuyer

Pros:
Free Delivery on Orders over £50 (Maximum 5 day wait, great if you aren't desperate for your items, but items can arrive sooner if load isn't high)
Good CS and RMA Service (Friend's HDD died just under a year, RMA'ed to eBuyer and tested as faulty/dead. Item was discontinued so instead offered him a full refund. £70 for his 250GB drive. He went and got himself a 500GB Sammy with £5 to spare) Great pricing. Most often Scan's today only prices are eBuyer's normal prices.
No charges on NFF for RMA's (None for me anyway). Can add and remove items from order easily.
Customer Service Phone/Email open 2 hours longer than the other two.
Deliveries always on time. (ie no last minute delays, nothing to do with CityLink)
Happy Hours.
Ability to switch between vat and ex vat prices on the site.
6 Phone calls to CS and I've never been on initial hold for longer than 25 seconds. So pretty quick, and it's an 0870 number which is around 6p/min whereas the other 2 have 0871 10p/min numbers.

Cons:
No major ones so far for me. If website layout was like OcUK that would be fabbo.
No direct email address for queries but there is an eNote system like a ticket one.

Scan

Pros:
Hexus Free Delivery
Good prices, Today Only and specials.
Customer Service is great most of the time for quite alot of people.
SMS Order Notification (Pretty sure it's free but correct me if I'm wrong). Have a Scan.Care forum at Hexus although it's not guaranteed to be fast it's quick most of the time. Direct Email address for queries and all sorts.
Takes suggestions for items to stock. (May take a while, Thermalright Ultra 120 took 7 months iirc but it's better than nothing right?)
Lowest free delivery price (Only if you have Hexus Free delivery or the AVForums one or PC Pro one iirc)

Cons:
Slow site - sometimes (Than competitors), Search engine slow - all the time (better to use Google to search the site for your item).
I blame the aspx software for the above two. Either that or bad coding or just a real slow database and server. The other two are PHP based web servers and are significantly faster for searching/browsing.
Stock system is slow and quite a lot of the time your order will be updated in the evening saying items are out of stock etc. Have to ring up CS to modify an order. Crap memory selection as there is only Corsair and other tat memory. Seem to be have an exclusive deal with Corsair but if Corsair's your thing then they have the best pricing most of the time. At the last minute you'll be notified if your order is delayed. (Quite a few people had problems with this)
10p/min phone line, coupled with ringing up to change your order costs quite a bit.

Overclockers UK

Pros:
Deliveries always on time. (ie no last minute delays, nothing to do with CityLink).
Nice site and navigation, also fast loading.
Quite a wide range on everything.
Item's on sale pricing every week.
Clearance Section/B Grade section.

Cons:
Items can be badly packed at times.
Sometimes you may receive B grade items (Can be rectified though)
Pricing is significantly higher on products in demand.
Website shows item prices as ex vat, quite annoying when you actually want to know the real price.
Some people have bad experiences with CS and RMA's but no problems had here. But like i have said they are quite useful for their ram range.
Isn't much of a Con but quite alot of people don't like their marketing style/selling practices. ie 3Ghz Guaranteed Q6600 at a higher price. Well if an idiot goes and buys that it can't be helped. It's not OcUK's fault people are that stupid to pay for it. No lies were told in the product description anyway.
It's just that most people slag off OcUK at any occasion
No free delivery options anytime.

I'm sure others may have constructive pros and cons to add from their experiences.

 

Me thinks we need a thread which deals with rants/raves and or praises for online merchants.
Sort of praising Newegg.com and questioning Surpluscomputers.com

 

That's a good idea. It'll help newbies decide where to buy things from.

 

The overclockers site is good - that's their one upside. The Scan website is great to browse (best of all), but probably worst of all to search.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm right to slag off a retailer that's given me or people I know poor service on multiple occasions. MicroDirect and OverclockersUK are in that list. Ebuyer I've had minor ag with, Scan I've had an order once delayed by one day, Aria I've had a lengthy RMA with (though it did eventually get resolved) - OcUK though, second hand items sometimes turn up and delivery is often inexplicably delayed.