As Michael Jackson once said "Do you remember the time..." when online retailers (otherwise known as e-tailers) were very efficient, friendly and great to use? I do. In fact, I did a huge amount of online shopping in December 2006, with no hiccups, no delays on delivery and no complaints. However, since January I've encountered many problems with multiple retailers, some of which I'm highlighting here, in case you decide to shop with either sometime soon:
Aria.co.uk I believe aria's problems have surfaced since the introduction of their new website. I recently purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate OEM and 2 x 250GB Samsung Spinpoint drives from Aria to upgrade both my main rig and Fileserver. In fact, I placed the order on Friday 2nd February, over a week ago.
All the items were in stock - as the website showed 5+ ready for dispatch. However, I've not seen or heard anything since placing the order. I decided to send them an email prior to the weekend, so hopefully they'll reply within the next day or so, letting me know there was a delay, it's now on the way to me and they'll apologise. I doubt it though.
If you think it's a one-off though, then you're wrong. I've placed 2 orders in the past month for work, the first of which was for 6 PCs, well components and the second for a printer and USB key drives. The first order (6 PCs) arrived, minus the memory and one DVD-RW drive. Only the key drives have arrived from the second. As I'm the middle-man, the end users (my colleagues and students) are suffering and complaining to me. I rely on my supplier(s) to be fast and efficient, and not to deliver me part of an order.
I'm still awaiting confirmation on all 3 orders - none of which have been fulfilled. If I don't receive the outstanding items before Thursday 15th, then I'll be cancelling the lot, demanding a refund and taking my custom elsewhere - most likely Scan.
At this point, I regret not going with Scan in the first place...
Mini-itx.com Mini-itx are the main supplier of EPIA's mini-itx systems in the UK. Unfortunately they're also the worst. I placed an order for an EPIA 5000, along with a 60w PSU back in November 2006. Everything arrived very quickly and I was happy. However, after many days of testing, trying to get a stable system (both Windows and Linux) running, I realised that the motherboard was faulty. Mini-itx recommended trying alternative memory sticks, so I purchased an additional 256MB Kingston memory module from the same company. It, again, arrived promptly, but didn't yield any better results. So I RMA'd the EPIA 5000 and the 256MB memory back to Mini-itx for testing. This was back in early January. Mini-itx sent me an email (eventually) to confirm that they had received the RMA and were about to test the items.
However, it's now February 11th and I still haven't had another reply from them. I've emailed several times since and have even included PC Pro's Watchdog team in the emails, but still I'm left with just the 60w PSU - I'm missing my EPIA 5000 and 256MB memory - over £100 worth of components. That £100 could enable me to buy components from an alternative supplier.
I haven't provided any links to either retailer, as I wouldn't recommend either to any of you at this point in time. Both Aria and Mini-itx need to seriously re-think their customer service, delivery times and stock system before I purchase anything in the future from them. I hope that you wont use either retailer in the near future too, as you'll no doubt encounter the same problems as I have. To sum both up in two words - They'rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre shite.