Shopping for Aggravation

When is an online bargain not a bargain? When $10 saved turns into hours of frustration.

Lincoln Spector, special to PC World

The following is a true story.

It all began on February 11, when I visited Shopping.com's Web site and bought two DVDs, The Truman Show and The Mask of Zorro, at bargain prices. Later that day I received e-mail confirming my order. From such innocent encounters are nightmares made.

On February 17, the order arrived. The Truman Show was the DVD ordered, but The Mask of Zorro was a mere VHS cassette. Call me a video snob, but that wasn't what I ordered.

Okay. Mistakes happen. Even the best mail-order house occasionally puts the wrong item in the box--but they make up for it by correcting their mistakes swiftly and courteously.

And so I called Shopping.com's toll-free customer service line for the first of many times. I should have suspected that something was wrong when the representative asked me for my order number. Was that the same as the order confirmation number on the invoice? "No." The invoice number? "No." The customer number? "No." The Order Number, which was the only one she could look up, wasn't on the invoice. Luckily, I still had the original confirmation e-mail, and that had the order number.

Once I gave her the order number, the representative agreed to the return, and explained the procedure: In three or four working days, someone would e-mail me a Return Material Authorization (RMA) number. Then I would receive a prepaid FedEx form for returning the cassette. Only after Shopping.com received the cassette would they send me the DVD. Not the best procedure from my point of view, but acceptable.

Of course, it would have been less acceptable had she told me that Shopping.com wasn't actually going to do any of these things unless they were beaten over the head with a Pontiac.

I didn't need to use the car, but I sure needed the phone. Still waiting for an RMA number, I called a week later and another week after that. The first time a representative assured me that she couldn't help me in any way. The second time, another representative told me the same thing, listened to me wail, then took pity on me and gave me an RMA number. She also promised to send me the prepaid FedEx form.

She didn't. (Maybe I wasn't pitiful enough.) When I called again a week later, the representative sounded a bit perplexed--she probably had never seen an RMA number before. But she did promise to send me the FedEx form.

By now I'd given up on ever seeing The Mask of Zorro on DVD. I was expecting my credit card bill soon, and I was figuring I'd have to contest the charge with my bank.

On Saturday, March 13, the unthinkable happened--I received the shipping form! The following Monday I returned the tape, with a letter asking them to credit my Visa account. Who knows--if I asked them to send me The Mask of Zorro again, I might get a lawn mower or something.

According to FedEx, Shopping.com received the tape on March 17. One week and two phone calls later, Shopping.com finally credited my account. By then, I'd already paid my Visa bill and started the procedure of contesting the charge.

As the battle was winding down, I did a couple of Usenet searches to see what other people are saying about Shopping.com. These are easy enough to do: Just go to Deja News (see link at right), enter the name of the company you want opinions on, and press Enter. (You can also go to AltaVista and click the Usenet option.) People's comments were overwhelmingly negative. If I had checked Usenet before buying, I'd have fewer gray hairs today.

True, my problems occurred while Shopping.com was being bought out by Compaq, which probably contributed to the confusions. But I found many complaints online that predated the buyout.

Mike Rubin, the general manager of Shopping.com, promises to "personally rectify the situation" for customers with similar complaints made during the transition time. "Shopping.com is committed to providing satisfactory service to all of its customers, and under the new management team, we have made this our number one priority," he says. Lincoln Spector writes PC World's Answer Line column, as well as a self-syndicated computer humor column called Gigglebytes. You'll find links to most of his work at www.dnai.com/~lincoln.