Category Archives: Online services

Flights booking, printing, and other remote orders

Australian Geographic: poor quality items, poor customer service

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Online services, Shopping

We just posted this review over at ProductReview.com.au. This experience doesn’t seem to be a rare occurence…

We have ordered from here twice – once the Galileo thermometer, and secondly, a space-projector thing, and both items have been terrible. The thermometer wasn’t actually calibrated, and didn’t go above 28 degrees (useless in Sydney) so was basically something decorative, and the projector wouldn’t actually project onto anything further than 50cm away in a darkened room.

We had no troubles returning the thermometer, but we have been having some problems with the projector. Firstly, they were difficult about returning it if it wasn’t resalable in its original packing – it makes me shudder that they would resell this thing that doesn’t actually work – and then, when they refunded it, they refunded the wrong amount. They rectified this, but have still not paid for return postage. They say that they will only refund return postage if the item is damaged. I would say that not working as one would reasonably expect (i.e. project onto walls in a dark room from further way than 50cm) would indicate that a product was a bit damaged… We will wait to hear back from them regarding the postage, but really, we are not going to order from here again. The products have been a bit crap, despite costing a reasonable amount of money ($70~ and $60) You’d probably be be better off going to your local $2 shop.

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mBox eFax – Just don’t.

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Online services, , ,

I signed up to this company this afternoon, as I had to send a couple of faxes this month, and I didn’t want to go to the the post-office. They had a “1 month FREE use” thing, if you entered your financials, and agreed to have a monthly subscription for $9.95 afterwards – which you could cancel at anytime.  Being that I would have paid to send the faxes, since it was not only saving me a trip out of the house, but to also, to Australia Post, I thought that this was fairly reasonable.

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Buying shoes online – don’t do it to yourself

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Clothes, Good experiences, Letters, Online services, Satisfactory outcomes,

I have been banned from buying shoes online by the resident Frenchman. Why? Because I have had to return 5 pairs over the years, because they NEVER EVER FIT. And then I end up paying extra for postage and more recently, experience anxiety because I worry that they won’t fit.

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Book Depository: too much security, not enough communication

Bad experiences, Letters, Online services, Tedious processes, Unsatisfactory outcomes

Christmas time. I decided to order books as presents from the Book Depository, and have them delivered to my son and his family in Australia. It has always worked in the past, with any other provider. Probably even with the Book Depository, but not this time.

When the parcel was not showing up much after the stated delivery date, I started enquiring, but nothing helpful was forthcoming. “[D]ue to security reasons [they] are unable to disclose”, the order was cancelled. No notice was ever sent that this had happened, and particularly not why.

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Australia Post’s consistent performance

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Courriers, Online services, Unsatisfactory outcomes

A few hours ago, I had to look up the details of an Australia Post outlet, on my phone. Fortunately, Australia Post has a rather slick and to-the-point mobile website.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work…

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Powershop

Accounts, Australia, Letters, Online services, Utilities

Our energy woes continue. We have moved our electricity away from Energy Australia (still need to get gas from them though) to Powershop. New Zealand owned, big on renewables and have an interesting business model in that the customer can sort buy excess power cheaply, to be used at later times.

To get access to these specials however, one has to be on Facebook, or get their phone app which wants access to your contacts, camera and a whole lot of other stuff which doesn’t seem relevant.

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Café Press

Australia, Bad experiences, Letters, Online services,

I think there must be a problem with your postage calculator. I wanted to order 9 3×3 stickers. Postage came up at $72. Surely this must be a mistake? I sent a 2kg plum pudding to France last week and it cost $93. And I know we are in Australia, but we are on the same planet. It’s not like you to have to have someone deliver the stickers to NASA and have them sent on a rocket to the space station.

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Simply Electronics

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Letters, Online services, Tedious processes

Having had the most ancient model of Nokia for a while now, I decided the other week (month) that I would propel myself into the future and order a new telephone from the internet. The wonders of technology blah blah..

So. I went to a shopping website that helpfully told me where I could buy the phone from for the least expensive price. From this list I found this: SimplyElectronics(dot)net.

Don’t. Do. It. To. Yourself.

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BigWarehouse Spares: Positive

Accounts, Australia, Good experiences, Online services

Our washing machine isn’t doing a proper spin-cycle – it just kinds of wobbles around slowly like a geriactric lost on the way home from the bingo.

After much research and staring at the base of the washing machine, I determined that the drive belt was loose, as it did’nt make a ‘ping’ noise when I plucked on it.

Deciding that this was was indeed the source of our problems, I looked on the interwebs everywhere to replace this part.

Eventually I stumbled upon BigWarehouse Spares which has the most user friendly seach of all the sites. They also happened to have some evidence that our washing machine did actually exist (it is an older model) and even had some parts for it.

Though they didn’t have the exact part that I needed, I emailed them. Within the hour, I received not one, but three emails from them, updating me on their search for the part. The third email detailed the link to their site where I could purchase the item.

A positive experience indeed. Though lets hope that it was the loose drive shaft making the spin cycle go so slowly.

Unending spam from LastMinute

Accounts, Australia, Bad experiences, Letters, Online services, Tedious processes

LastMinute does not care for their customers on spam matters. Make sure you don’t give them your email address unless you are willing to receive their “communications” ad vitam eternam…

To: "lastminute.com" <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Subject: Re: 50% off restaurants | 50% off theatre | 50% off spa | More

Hello,

Please stop spamming me.

I have received half a dozen of messages similar to the ones below recently, for all of which
I’ve followed the unsubscribe link and was enventually greeted by a
message of the “You have been successfully unsubscribed” type. Or not.

Not to mention that, whenever I gave you this email address, I carefully
opted *out* of any promotional communication from you, as I always do.

Please unsubscribe *immediately* my address <XXX>
from *all* your databases, as I don’t trust you to use it “reasonnably.”

Also, let me remind you that the standard for electronic mail is *not* HTML, but plain text. You are therefore cutting yourself from a portion of your possible customers by not providing the content appropriately. I doubt they’d bother following that single link anyway, so it may prove to be a time saver for them…

On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 11:20:06AM -0000, lastminute.com wrote:
> This is an HTML email which could not be displayed by your email client. To display it in a web browser, please click here:
> [url=http://XXX]http://XXX[/url]

Nobody replied nor acted on this complaint. Same for the next two or three others I sent. I eventually got something looking like a satisfactory answer by writing to their infrastructure provider.

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