Saturday 2 June 2012

Website Review: Gardening Direct

As I said in my last post, which asked if there are any decent garden supply websites out there, I haven't been particularly impressed with any, but some are worse than others. Of those I've tried, gardeningdirect.co.uk is, in my opinion, the worse.

They didn't deliver my order at all. In their defence, they did give me a full refund, but the lack of communication between their customer services departments and the amount of time it takes to get a response from them, will stop me using them again.

I emailed them a few weeks after ordering to ask where my order was. A week later, when I still hadn't received a reply, I tried to phone them. I kept getting held in a queue for ages and having to hang up. It took a few days of trying to actually get through and the person I spoke to said there was no record of my order. I told him that I'd emailed a week ago and included my order confirmation in the email, but hadn't received a reply. He said that they ere very busy at the moment, so it was taking a while to respond to emails and he'd try to find my order and call me back. I didn't get a call from him, but I did get a reply to my original email, about a week after the conversation, saying that I should have received my order by no and they were out of stock, so they would give me a refund.

Then a couple of eeks after that, I got a phone call saying they had had a problem with their ordering system and my order hadn't been dispatched, but they were now out of stock and would be giving me a full refund. Clearly the people going through the problem orders to make the calls, the people who answer the phone and the people who respond to emails, don't communicate with each other or update a central system with the details of the communication. Unfortunately for me, their finance department do communicate, because I only got one refund ;-)