Do you still remember the days when the customer was king? In those days, when you entered a shop, a most friendly man or woman wearing a very tidy apron kindly hailed you with: "Goodmorning sir. Welcome to our shop. How may I be of service?" After which the man or woman did everything in his or her power to answer to every single one of your requests. After all, you were the highly valued customer; the bread and butter of the vendor in question.
Sadly, in these days of internet merchants, who only open a shop because they believe it will make them rich in a very short period without having to work very hard, these values of servitude and responsibility seem to be lost forever.
A month ago, Christine and I bought a new cooker for our house. We got a very good deal on one of these eBay shops and were very happy with our purchase. I made it clear to the seller that the cooker should be sent to our Italian address and not to the Belgian address which was still showing in eBay. The seller wasn't very happy about that and asked me to change the address in eBay in order to avoid confusion. Which I immediately did of course. After all, she was the highly valued seller. I changed the primary shipping address and sent another e-mail confirming the Italian address. Just to be sure.
Weeks went by and all of a sudden I got a rather distressing message from the people who'd bought our Belgian house. It said that someone wanted to deliver a large package with our name on it and originating from Italy. But since we didn't live there anymore, they had told the man to take it back to Italy.
So I sent the seller another e-mail, playing dumb and asking if our cooker was well on its way. To which I got the stunning reply: "Check your local UPS office, thanks."
Obviously, I foregave the most venerable seller this not so friendly answer. I understood that she was on a holiday and I felt very humble that I had to disturb her while she was having a juicy cocktail on the beach. I begged her pardon and asked how it was possible that the cooker had been sent to Belgium. After all, I had confirmed the Italian address many times. This is what she replied:
"We, as a rule imposed by eBay, can only send to the address registered in eBay. For you it only takes two minutes to change it, even after the purchase. I told you numerous times to change it if you wanted me to ship to another address. We open the eBay page and send to the registered address, also because you can imagine that if we have to look at all the e-mails for every shipment, and we can not change addresses on eBay ourselves. Up to you what to do next and by the way we're closed for holidays. Thanks."
This made my blood boil. Yes, I know. I'm a very bad customer. I'm simply incapable of keeping my calm when I'd rather should. I know I should've bowed at the seller and apologised for my incompetence. Of course it was all my fault. How is it possible that I didn't want to admit that? Because of my stupidity, the seller had totally confused between "address of residence" and "primary shipping address". I could use as an excuse that at the time of purchase we were still having a very shaky internet connection and only changing the shipping address had taken me over half an hour. After all, eBay is not what you could call a very light website to download. But that would be a very poor excuse indeed.
If you now click on the cooker we bought, it says that the seller has put it back up for sale. What a pity. And of course we'll never see our money back either. Tough luck. It's yet another lesson learnt.
NOT!!! :-)
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