Filmnight Easter Sale (merged)

GibsonSt19

This is truely a joke... it must be.

Sweetchuck

Tom125 wrote:

Well, thanks for the offer to help, Andrew. For a start you could honour the sale of 5 dvds that I purchased from your website at 4am yesterday morning - after trying for 12 hours without success, and then to find a day after receiving confirmation of the order by email, that your company had cancelled them - claiming that they were out of stock!

I have just checked your site, and all 5 are in stock, albeit at a far higher price. So, it would be nice if you could despatch them to me now.......

Don't hold your breath, mate. Their customer service is as dreadful as their website - which, incidentally, appears to have been overloaded yet again - do you guys not learn or just not care?!

Despite clearly being told that stock was available at sale prices when I ordered three days ago, my order was cancelled as there was no stock. What a surprise I got when I saw that both boxsets are still in stock - albeit at RRP, as with your situation.

I e-mailed asking why customers' orders weren't being honoured and why they were being lied to about DVDs being out of stock when they are clearly marked as 'in stock'' on their site.

I got the kind of reply you'd expect: very sorry, blah, blah, blah, lack of stock with the supplier, blah, blah, blah.

Other companies in the past have honoured sale prices when sale stock is exhausted - why do Filmnight not take this approach, which would certainly do a lot to repair the ill feeling which their utter incompetence has caused?

Take a hit in your pocket for the sake of long-term custom. Sure, it hurts initially but if you build up loyalty then the rewards will be more than worth it.

I for one will be doing everything I can to ensure that my friends, family and associates are aware of the disregard these guys have for their customers. When people realise how shabby their organisation is and how utterly thoughtless they are with regard to their customers' satisfaction, they'll soon start voting with their mice and head for Play.com, Amazon, CDWow et al.

Useless. Absolutely useless.

richard72

lol ok then m8

GibsonSt19

richard72 wrote:

lol ok then m8

Sorry, didn't mean to be pretentious!

Alzani

Sweetchuck wrote:

Despite clearly being told that stock was available at sale prices when I ordered three days ago, my order was cancelled as there was no stock. What a surprise I got when I saw that both boxsets are still in stock - albeit at RRP, as with your situation.

Once we are sold out of a product at the sale price, it is no longer available in the sale. Whether we have stock of the product on our normal site at the normal price is simply not relevant - once we have removed a product from the sale that's it as far as sale prices go.

Sweetchuck wrote:

...repair the ill feeling which their utter incompetence has caused?

I totally understand that there is an evident ill feeling from a few people towards the company, but at the end of the day, I didn't have to take it upon myself to talk to people in the forums with concerns and could have just left you all to chat about it amoungst yourselves; but that's not what we want to do, we do care about our customers and are striving to do everything that we can to rectify the issues that have been caused here.

Sweetchuck wrote:

they'll soon start voting with their mice and head for Play.com, Amazon, CDWow et al.

Well they can enjoy the higher prices that come along with that decision then can't they



Andy

Babbler

Sweetchuck wrote:

Don't hold your breath, mate. Their customer service is as dreadful as their website - which, incidentally, appears to have been overloaded yet again - do you guys not learn or just not care?!

Despite clearly being told that stock was available at sale prices when I ordered three days ago, my order was cancelled as there was no stock. What a surprise I got when I saw that both boxsets are still in stock - albeit at RRP, as with your situation.

I e-mailed asking why customers' orders weren't being honoured and why they were being lied to about DVDs being out of stock when they are clearly marked as 'in stock'' on their site.

I got the kind of reply you'd expect: very sorry, blah, blah, blah, lack of stock with the supplier, blah, blah, blah.

Other companies in the past have honoured sale prices when sale stock is exhausted - why do Filmnight not take this approach, which would certainly do a lot to repair the ill feeling which their utter incompetence has caused?

Take a hit in your pocket for the sake of long-term custom. Sure, it hurts initially but if you build up loyalty then the rewards will be more than worth it.

I for one will be doing everything I can to ensure that my friends, family and associates are aware of the disregard these guys have for their customers. When people realise how shabby their organisation is and how utterly thoughtless they are with regard to their customers' satisfaction, they'll soon start voting with their mice and head for Play.com, Amazon, CDWow et al.

Useless. Absolutely useless.

Although I agreee about the disappointment I had when not being able to get the DVD's I wanted I have to disagree that other companies honour it. CD Wow have cancelled my order on several occasions when they had a sale (no - I didnt use 2 vouchers!).

How big is Filmnight? Perhaps this is an expantion plan and they just did not know what they were in for! Look at the Debenhams website whenever they have a sale! Its down more than up.

At least they have a menmber of staff here "tipping" us on new sale items added and also taking on our point and passing it on to the web people. I found the site still slow - but managed to get an order in in about 10 minutes this time - not 3 hours! This may be due to loss of custom or upgrade - who knows...

^!£$&

thanks for letting us know anyway!!!

Sweetchuck

Alzani wrote:

I'll start by clearing up this little issue here. Unfortuately (and something that we're fixing at this moment in time) we have two "in stock" messages that relate to products; one marked with "Normally despatched within 24 hours" and one with "Normally despatched within 1 to 2 working days". The difference between the two being that the former means that it is in stock with our distribution warehouse, and the latter means it's in stock at our suppliers. This sale related to our warehouse stock only, hence the reason that your product may appear in stock, but not actually be in the sale. We realise that this is not obvious and are now looking at the appropriateness of the wording relating to the stock availability.
Also, due to the way stock availablilty reporting happens (it takes around 20 minutes for a 'purchased' item of stock to depreciate the site's stock level by one) this is why a fair few people have recieved emails saying that unfortunately their ordered DVD is now out of stock. Unfortuantely this is not something that can be helped, and virtually all online retailers with an extensive library of products suffer the same problem. Usually it's not an issue, but due to the enormous amount of orders that took place in an incredibly small amount of time over the last couple of days it has highlighted this as a problem that we need to try and address.

If this is the case, why did it take 3 days for me to be informed that my order was out of stock?

As for "virtually all online retailers with an extensive library of products" suffering from the same problems - I can't say I've ever experienced anything like this before and place no credence in your claim whatsoever. Sure, things go out of stock from time to time but you still receive the goods at the price you paid.

If I order an item from Amazon which subsequently goes out of stock before being dispatched to me, I would not expect to be told that demand had exceeded supply but I could still obtain the item by paying a premium on top of the price I had already paid.

If a deal has been struck at a certain price, it's an extremely poor show to back out by claiming (untruthfully) that your stock has been exhausted.

Alzani wrote:

I totally understand that there is an evident ill feeling from a few people towards the company, but at the end of the day, I didn't have to take it upon myself to talk to people in the forums with concerns and could have just left you all to chat about it amoungst yourselves; but that's not what we want to do, we do care about our customers and are striving to do everything that we can to rectify the issues that have been caused here.

Your presence on here doesn't do a lot to help the people who feel let down. As you'll see by a few posts on here, the way in which you could rectify the situation would be to honour your customers' orders.

Offering 25% off the full RRP of a DVD is not "striving to do everything that we can to rectify the issues that have been caused here".

Alzani wrote:

This isn't quite as simple as that. Due to the issues that I've just highlighted we would have been looking at "hit in the pocket" of literally hundreds of thousands of pounds which isn't possible for a company that is still a smaller but ever growing competitor on the online DVD retail business!

It's exactly that simple. You shouldn't be reaching beyond yourselves by tempting people with offers you can't possibly hope to fulfill.

Alzani wrote:

Well they can enjoy the higher prices that come along with that decision then can't they

Spot on. You get what you pay for and when it comes to Filmnight, you pay low prices for an incompetent, unreliable and unprofessional organisation which fails to honour its promises.

I for one don't mind paying a few quid extra if I know that the company with whom I am dealing is reputable and can at least be trusted to honour my order.

Babbler

Sweetchuck wrote:

If I order an item from Amazon which subsequently goes out of stock before being dispatched to me, I would not expect to be told that demand had exceeded supply but I could still obtain the item by paying a premium on top of the price I had already paid.

Although for a misprice - Amazon did exactly that to some people when it came to 3rd rock from the sun. They didnt even e-mail people until they complained! Some people didnt realise until a second order they made with it came with a bill for postage.

RevOnline

Alzani wrote:

In the online DVD retail world, we'll still a relatively small presence, but we can physically see the speed that we're expanding by the ever increasing amount of sales that we make through the site. In the whole scheme of things, we're a very influential company as we have the largest concentration of film stores in London with obviously the Filmnight.com stores, but we also own Apollo Films and Vid Biz which will both eventually go under a Filmnight.com rebrand. We're also the primary provider of mobile film related content for both Vodafone Live and O2 iMode with a couple of the biggest WAP sites in the world!

Plenty for me to steer clear of then...