I’ve been a customer of Play.com for many years. I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, with them and have promoted them heavily on this site. However, things have turned sour.

How Play.com treated me

On the 13th July I ordered 2 product, both of which were in stock. On the 19th July I realised that I hadn’t heard anything further about these orders so looked them up on the companies website. Both were showing as “packing” – the Help text indicates that this status usually occurs for up to 24 hours. Next day, sure enough, I received a “despatched” email but only for one item. The other was still “packing”. Next day I sent them an email but, still finding it as “packing” on the website on the 22nd I rang them.

Play appear to use an “off shore” help desk – the line is quiet and they appear to work from a basic script. I told them the issue and they told me that as it was being packed it would take 24 hours. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they were doing something to ensure it got despatched.

On Saturday 23rd I received a reply to my email..

Your order is currently being packed as of 23/07/2011, and should be dispatched shortly.

The status was still “packing” but they’d changed the date on the order to show that this was the status as of the 23rd. When I rang on the Monday (yes, it was still “packing”) I was told it only had that status since Saturday – I corrected them firmly, stating that they’d simply updated the date but in fact it had been packing since the previous week. Again I was told it would be despatched within 24 hours, and they’d left a note for the despatch department to chase it up.

On Tuesday it was still, yes, “packing”. I rang them. They told me it would be 24 hours. I saw red. My voice rose and I angrily asked to speak to a manager. After 10 minutes of being on hold I needed to leave for work so ended up hanging up. They made no attempt to contact me in the meantime – I rang them myself  an hour later. Again, I was told it would be 24 hours. This time I calmly asked to speak to a manager. They put me through to a supervisor who told me she would chase it up herself and ensure something happens with the next 24 hours.

Whilst waiting I directed Tweets at Play.com via their Twitter account – the first one to express that I’m unhappy with their customer service, the other to ask if there’s anyone in the UK I can speak to with regard to my issue. The first was ignored, the second one resulted in them directing me to their standard customer services email. When I replied to ask what I did when that didn’t work they took my order ID and investigate it.

And I got a result. After 2 weeks.

The product is….. out of stock. The item on the Play website also now shows it as taking 1-2 weeks to deliver. So they offered a refund, which I’ve accepted, with apologies. I’ve now ordered the same item from Amazon.

How Play.com treated a friend

Maybe this is just a one-off? Or maybe not.

A friend of mine ordered a Christmas present last year from Play. However, when it turned up it was a different product – similar but not what he ordered. He rang their Helpdesk to arrange to send it back. However, he was told that they didn’t have stock of the product they ordered, hence why they’d sent something similar.

So, he wanted his money back. No problem. Would he get his postage back? Yes. Great. He sent the product back and was refunded – but not for the postage. He rang their Help Desk to be told they wanted him to email a copy of his receipt (even though the postage price would have been printed on his returned parcel). He did this but the money didn’t turn up. After ringing them 3 times about this and getting nowhere he gave up, had his Play.com account deleted (you can’t do this via the website) and never shopped there again. He told them he was going to do this on the third phone call but nobody seemed to care – they happily cancelled his account.

Why does this matter?

I know these aren’t one-off’s – a couple of years ago the website Bitter Wallet stated that Play.com missed out on a place in their Worst Company in Britain contest by a single vote

Even if my issue this time is a one-off it doesn’t matter – they’ve had multiple opportunities to resolve this to my satisfaction (which is hardly set to a high bar – send me my product!) and have failed at every opportunity. That’s not a mistake, it’s blind incompetence – they have treated a good customer so poorly and there really was no need for it. After waiting 2 weeks, I am now forced to order the product elsewhere and wait longer to finally get it.

What’s failing from Play.com here is 2 fold..

1. No one is realising that they are repeating the same message. If they did they’d realise something was wrong. Repeating the same, incorrect message leads to an unhappy customer.
2. They appear to have no way to escalate an issue – all they can is repeat instructions from the website. If it deviates from this, they’re stuck.

I contacted Play’s PR company informing them of this post and giving them an opportunity to respond. I have yet to receive a response from them.

Last night I spent a few hours with my bosses nieces Netbook, as I’d been asked if I could cure it of a virus.

It was an HP Mini 210 in “Sonoma Red”. The dark red paintwork is not only on the lid, but extends to underneath as well – and very nice it looks too.

It runs Windows 7 Starter (which I hadn’t tried before – indeed, I’ve not tried Windows 7 on a Netbook at all) and has an N450 Atom processor (1.67Ghz) with 1GB memory and a 250GB hard drive.

The keyboard is a “scrabble tile” style, again something I’ve not tried before and, because of the width of the HP, is a good size. It was nice to use, unlike the touchpad which many other reviews have commented on. Rather than have separate buttons, the HP trackpad has it so that you click down the pad itself in the corners. It doesn’t work very well, particularly when I was trying to right click. Maybe playing with the trackpad settings would have helped, but I didn’t get an opportunity to try.

It’s a pretty standard 10.1″ 1024×600 resolution screen, but thanks to the “LED HP BrightView” it is extremely bright – even on mains I had the brightness turned down.

Windows 7 Starter worked really well and moved along at a good speed – and none of the performance-sapping features had been turned off (such as menu animations, etc). It’s a shame that this isn’t available after-market – if I wanted to upgrade my own Netbook to Windows 7 I’d have to buy Windows 7 Home Premium, as even Home Basic isn’t available retail. Yet, I’d not use (or turn off) the extra features that Home Premium would give me. £70+ Windows upgrade for a Netbook that cost me £200 a number of years ago? The maths doesn’t make sense.

Back to the HP, it has all the standard connectors, including VGA, 3 USB ports and a card reader. However, it had a side mounted power switch on which the power light was mounted – this makes it awkward at first glance to see the power state of the HP when the screen is blank. Similarly, they’ve out the HD activity light on the other side – again difficult to glance at. There’s a VGA webcam and, unlike many netbooks, Bluetooth is present as standard (although I couldn’t see any switches or lights related to it). There are also no “hatches” underneath for upgrading the miserly 1GB memory BUT, unlike other manufacturers, HP have made it easy to do just that. Behind the battery are buttons which release the whole of the coloured underside and allow direct access to the underside of the components, including the hard drive and single memory slot. This means that the memory can be upgraded to 2GB and without even taking out a screw.

Speaking of the battery – this is a 6 cell which light tests have shown to give over 8 hours of life. It sticks out the bottom quite a way and, in the model I was looking at, seemed a little loose. None-the-less, the size doesn’t get in the way and the battery life is excellent.

Additional software I didn’t get a chance to try out, but it appears to come with the usual manufacturer software plus some additional branded software – Microsoft Works, Cyberlink DVD suite and Arcsoft webcam, for instance. It also comes with a fair share of trials and crapware that you’ll just end up uninstalling anyway.

The specific model I tried no longer appears to be available, but others are. For instance, the Mini 210 WR430EA is £280 at play.com.

Summary of HP Mini 210

The price puts the HP Mini 210 in the higher price band for Netbooks and you can see why – a long battery life and excellent build quality make this an easy to use and speedy Netbook. If I was in the market to buy another, I’d look seriously at the HP.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 3rd December 2010.

Gallery

There are quite a few sites around that offer money off vouchers and coupons for online retailers. Quidco, however, not only does that but, if you visit the retailer via them, you can earn money back as well. Indeed, it’s this last operation that Quidco was originally set up to provide – vouchers and coupons is only a recent addition.

Simply sign up – it’s incredibly easy to do – and then search for an online retailer. Click on the link and you’re taken to the relevant website. Buy your item and you’ll find Quidco “tracks” a certain amount of cashback – this is listed on the site under your profile details, where you can also see payments (which occur regularly direct to your bank account).  The amount of cashback is dependant on retailer and is listed along with the retailers link.

I regularly use it, for instance, when buying from Play.com. The one notable omission is the lack of Amazon for cashback.

Never-the-less, I’ve recently got £40 back from a £200 home insurance and my wife last night bought a new phone on contract and received an extra (on top of cash back from the retailer) £40. It’s free money, basically.

If you use Firefox, Chrome or IE 7 or 8 you can even add Quidco as a search engine – making the whole process even less hassle.

Quidco WordPress Shortcode

Quidco offer a “refer a friend” service. If you go into the “Referral Earnings” screen, they will provide you with generic Quidco links to add to your site, but also specific links for retailers. I’ve therefore created my own little shortcode that will add this to my site.

Here’s the code, which needs to be added to functions.php…

add_shortcode('quidco','add_quidco');
function add_quidco($paras="",$content="") {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array('alt'=>''),$paras));
    if ($alt!="") {$lookup=$alt;} else {$lookup=$content;}
    $lookup=strtolower(str_replace(".","-",$lookup));
    return '<a href="http://www.quidco.com/user/xxx/yyy/'.str_replace(" ","_",$lookup).'" title="'.$content.'" title="'.$content.'" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">'.$content.'</a>';
}

You’ll need to replace xxx and yyy with the user specific information that’s shown in the “Referral Earnings” screen. Now simply placed [quidco] and [/quidco] around any shop names, and it will an automatic link to the appropriate Quidco referral screen. Hopefully. Dots are replaced by dashes but, obviously, if you write the shop name different to how Quidco refers to them, it may not work. In this case, specify the name as an additional parameter of ALT.

e.g. Two ways to link to play.com, both will work the same – [quidco]play.com[/quidco] or [quidco alt="play-com"]play.com[/quidco]

Note that when using the ALT parameter, you must specify the shop name as Quidco uses it in it’s link (e.g. with the dots converted to hyphens).