A series of sorry tales

I've been shopping on the Internet for over a decade, almost without incident. It seems either I've been very lucky, or I was saving all my bad luck up for our latest project.

We've been having an en-suite shower room fitted and our online purchases have, to say the least, not been straightforward. My previous successes in the area of online retail have definitely lowered my guard, to the point where I never even think of checking for adverse reviews before using a new supplier. More fool me. I can't work out whether the plumbing supply trade has more than its fair share of incompetents, but such has been our experience so far.

Problem #1: Broken shower tray; strange approach to customer service
We ordered a Coram shower tray and door from a supply company who quoted up to 5 days delivery. I gave the builder an estimate of arrival, to which he worked. It didn't turn up. To be fair, this was partly my fault for misreading the delivery details. It meant 5 *business* days. Buried even further in the small print, news that this countdown didn't start until after the products were shipped, and it had taken them two days to process the order and pick the goods from the warehouse. Hardly Internet speed that, is it?

But the problems didn't really start until the tray arrived. I should have been suspicious at the haste with which the courier dropped the goods off and presented his electronic device to record my signature, but a cursory glance revealed nothing amiss so I signed and he left. Three hours later, when the plumber came to remove the packaging, he discovered a huge chunk missing from one edge of the tray. A piece had been broken off and was rattling around inside the polythene sheet. I thought at first this had happened in transit - a result, perhaps, of heavy braking and the tray careering into another package in the van - but closer inspection showed that the package had previously been opened, and there was no waste trap included with the tray. It looked like a returned product had been recycled without being checked.

I returned to the supplier's website to look up the customer services number and was horrified to find they didn't have one. Policy. To "keep costs down" all customer complaints were handled by email. I emailed them, and proceeded (belatedly) to search out online reviews of the company. What I found sent a cold chill down my spine. Appalling reviews seemed to be the norm, and numbered in the hundreds, with only a handful of notes from satisfied customers. Late, incomplete, or totally absent deliveries, damaged goods, money taken from accounts before goods were shipped and never refunded. Lack of response to complaints. The same story told over and over again.

And then I received a reply to my customer services email. They handled (they said) all contact in the order of receipt (i.e. no attempt to prioritise urgent problems), and my ticket was #126 in the queue. I would receive an update on its progress every two hours until it was answered. Two hours later, I had moved to position #110 in the queue, but by now it was 3pm and they only work until 5. And this on the Friday before Bank Holiday weekend. I passed on the bad news to our plumber and builder, who began the process of scratching heads to work out how they could rejig their schedule to cope with the lack of a tray for what would probably be a minimum of another week.

The day after the holiday, the email countdown resumed. By then we had already investigated alternative suppliers. No local outlets carried stock and it soon became obvious our only recourse was to wait for the original suppliers to deal with the issue. This turned out to be a good thing, as my first contact with the support department that WASN'T a countdown informed me that a replacement would be despatched immediately. I replied that if this second delivery was going to take 9 days, like the first, that was unacceptable. "As a gesture of goodwill" they agreed to upgrade to next-day delivery and sure enough the replacement tray arrived the next day.

So a good result, eventually, but not without a deal of angst and I still wouldn't use them again. If I'd been able to talk to someone on the phone it could have been sorted on the Friday and a replacement delivered Saturday.

Problem #2: "Pedestal" Sink
We ordered a washbasin/toilet combo which came complete with pedestal. An easy assumption then that it had a standard fitting (wall mounted) to go with the pedestal. Wrong! The version supplied was designed to be fitted atop a vanitory unit. Luckily our builder had dealt with such a situation before, as none of us could face another trip around the complaint/replacement loop.

Problem #3: "Chrome" robe hooks
We chose a small (300mm wide) heated towel rail for the small return wall at the side of the shower, and I wanted some robe hooks to clip onto this similar to the one we already have in the main bathroom. I found two suitable designs but the one from taps4less, which because it was "chrome" came in considerably more expensive - like five times - the other, was exactly what I had in mind.

Delivery was swift, as was the disappointment when I opened the package to find the hooks (two of them in the deal) were not solid chrome, nor even chrome plated brass, but that awful faux-chrome plastic that they use for kiddies toys.

A brief sojourn in the online forums yet again revealed one awful review after another, with no evidence that anyone had ever had any satisfaction from long months of complaining. I decided to swallow it. Yet another company I'll never deal with again.