Thursday, March 01, 2007

When on-line shopping goes wrong

Rich got into a small car accident a couple of weeks ago. He was at the front of a 3 car pile up on route 128. The back of his car was pretty dinged up, and we asked the insurance company if we could replace the car seats, and they said "Go for it."

So, I went this on-line site called babyage.com. I found one I liked, put it in my cart and decided to get a high chair while I was at it. I put the high chair in my cart, and checked the cart and the car seat was gone. I hit the "back" button on the browser and found the car seat again and checked out. Click click click. Whatever.

Then I got my confirmation e-mail. I had 2 car seats, and no freaking highchair. No problem, I'll just cancel the order, right? Nope. They have a 1 hour cancellation policy and NO way to cancel on line, and no freaking operators after 8:00 PM EST. I'm so used to Amazon that I just assume that other on-line retailers have comparable policies. Otherwise, how would they compete?

I called them the minute they opened the next day and the car seats had already shipped. They won't pay to ship them back. My credit card won't let me contest the charge because I won't return the merchandise. It would cost $40 or so to ship something that big down to bumfuck Alabama or wherever they are. My credit card company is under the impression that I can take a giant UPS box to the post office and they will "return to sender" for free. Yeah, right. That's a GREAT way to get it lost forever. Plus, while "return to sender" will work for a letter, I doubt it will work for a three foot box.

I think that since babyage has a fucked up cart system and a useless cancellation policy for an on line retailer they should pay to ship back the extra car seat. I did make a mistake, but I caught it in time, but there was nobody available to tell at their company. In fact, their phone system didn't even let me leave a message. It just hung up on me repeatedly.

So far I'm stuck with a $90 booster seat that I don't need that I'm trying to sell for $80 on craigslist. It's a deal. Somebody is selling the exact same seat for $100. I just want to sell it and end this rotten saga.

Grrr... Argh...