Oh dear, I’ve just been trying to place an order on M&S website.
I had £34 of reward vouchers - mostly in £1s and £2s, which all had to be entered by hand.
Also they had a special promotion which meant that IF I spent the vouchers online today, I’d get 25% off the whole order.
As I needed at least one very expensive item - a coat at over £100 - it was obviously very well worthwhile to order online and get the 25% off. Then I needed a lot of other stuff as well (some of it small bits and pieces), so it came to over £200 - but with the 25% off would only be £150. And with the £34 of vouchers only £116! Great: £200 of stuff for £116! What’s not to like?
Well, doing it all was fiddly, to put it mildly. I finally got to the end and hit order, but when the order confirmation came through, it was somehow all wrong - the smaller items (but not the larger ones, luckily) were all in multiples of 2 or 3, when I’d only wanted one.
No idea how this could possibly happen - I’m not a novice at online shopping, so positive I didn’t sit there pressing the plus button.
Realised I’d somehow ordered lots more stuff than I wanted. It doesn’t let you amend the order once placed, so my only option was to cancel - which you only have a 15-minute window to do.
Cancelled just in the nick of time, and got an immediate refund confirmation.
BUT, because I’d part-paid by vouchers, they could only refund those by putting new ones in the post. It wouldn’t let me correct the order and use them again, because it treated them as already used.
And furthermore, I wouldn’t get the 25% off either, because it was conditional on spending the vouchers today.
So, I have spent nearly and hour on the phone to customer support, explaining what had happened. At first, they said I shouldn’t have cancelled the order, because that meant the 25% discount was written off.
I said: “Well how was I supposed to know that? It doesn’t say anywhere that if you cancel, you won’t be entitled to try again - besides, it is over £50 we’re talking about, not peanuts! It was my whole reason for trying to order online in the first place. If it was £2.50, I’d let it go, but I’m not writing off a £50 promotion you promised me.”
So, he has eventually applied the 25% manually, so it can be done, but I think they should have offered at once - not just said “Oh, you shouldn’t have cancelled - it’s lost now” and expected me to accept losing £50 - or paying £50 over the odds - whichever way you look at it.
I am still not completely back in the situation I would have been in, as other promotional points if you spent over a certain amount were not honoured.
I’m starting to think I was hasty in cancelling, because all the unwanted duplicated were things like bubble-bath or body moisturiser, that I would either have used eventually, or could have taken back to the shop.
But I had simply no idea they would still count the vouchers as “spent”, even though the order they applied to was cancelled.
I think the whole intention of this 25% discount was to woo people back to the rather unsuccessful website. But I’m afraid, for me, it’s had the opposite effect, and I’m thinking I will never ever do this again, as it’s far too much aggravation, even though they’ve finally put through my discount manually.
I was within a hair’s breadth of scrapping the whole thing, and carrying on wearing my old, torn coat, that I was hoping to replace.
Tina
x
Although it did cross my mind to admit: “Look, I’m really not very well for all this - can’t you just sort it out?”