Rights on goods damaged during delivery and supplier appears to be dragging feet?

wife-spent-it-all

I ordered a hardwood garden table and chairs set off internet on 8th May. My credit card was charged that very same day. Waited 10 days and still nothing had been dispatched. My wife called them around the 19th May (it may have been the day before or after that – I can’t recall) and was told the goods would be arriving on the 27th May so I booked the day off work as I knew the items would be heavy. They actually arrived on the 26th when I was at work and my wife was left to help the delivery chap on her own.

The box that the table was in had split open during the journey and the legs appear to have fallen out and been thrown back in any old how. The legs have bolts embedded in them so they can be bolted to the table top. Some of these bolts appear to have scratched the surface of the table and left some deep marks. I told my wife to call the supplier and report it which she did. They said they would send a replacement table and collect the damaged one. Later that evening when I got home from work I opened the boxes with the chairs in and one of the chairs was also damaged. I took some photos of everything that was damaged, and the opened box that the table came in. I called the company myself the next morning (27th May to report that) and they said they would send a replacement chair along with the table. We would receive a call from their customer services team when the items were dispatched to let us know to expect them.

At this point we were happy and satisfied with the way things were being handled. However 9 days later on 4th June we still hadn’t heard anything from them so I sent them an email to say I wasn’t happy. I got a response which said

If the item has been purchased recently and appears to be faulty, please remember it can be returned to us. On its return, we shall examine it and, if a quality issue is apparent, we will replace it free of charge or offer a full refund.

This is a totally different line to what we were told on the phone on the 26th and 27th May.

I have since replied asking them to confirm if they are stating that it’s up to me to return the item to them. I have not yet received a reply as that email wasn’t sent until Friday night (it’s now Sunday night) but I currently have no intention of sending it back under my own expense. The thing that is going to complicate this saga is that since my wife was expecting replacement items to arrive, she has applied some teak oil to the 5 chairs that we are keeping as it stated in the manufactures instructions. We don’t want to send it all back for a refund – we want to keep it but when paying over £400 for a garden furniture set, you don’t expect damaged items. :mad:

I’m currently not sure how this is going to play out. It’s possible the email was made up of some standard boilerplate text following by some specific words added by the person sending it, so I could be getting worked up over nothing, which is why I haven’t mentioned company names etc as yet.

My main concern is that if they refuse to replace the damaged items then we may have no choice but to reject them under SOGA and send them back. However they may not accept them because we have applied a coat of teak oil to the chairs which means they aren’t in the original condition (they actually better than original now because we’ve put some expensive wood preservative on them, but its technically not original condition).

I have no room to store the damaged table because it’s rather big and I was expecting to assemble it and put it in the garden. So it’s remained outside up against the side of the house, however with all the rain we’ve had this weekend the boxes are now very wet. I doubt that a courier would accept a wet and soggy box for delivery back to the supplier. If they send out a new table and chair, then I can swap the boxes round and send the damaged table back in the dry box, assuming the courier will wait whilst I do that.

What are my options if this little saga turns nasty?

BargainGalore

In hindsight it would have been best to reject the goods upon arrival

I contact the company via email/post rejecting the goods under the SOGA and give them 7 days to reply or further action may deem necessary.

IE under the Consumer Credit Act your credit card company are duly responsible so perhaps contact them and ask for a form to claim money back

hollydays

With hindsight,you shouldn't have applied the teak oil,and you shouldn't have left the stuff outside in the rain.Can you name the company,or have you already done a search for their name on here?

Did you get the persons name?
Why not call back and insist on speaking to a Manager?
I wouldn't mention the teak oil and hopefully they will just send the replacements,you could let the packaging dry out maybe?

wife-spent-it-all

Yes, done the searches on here and found nothing. Hindsight is a great thing and at first this just seemed like a typical stuff treated badly by the courier type issue. We had no reason to be concerned that things would go badly because all the reviews we read about this place seemed to be positive on the customer service aspects.

I know who i spoke to and I'm going to give them another call tomorrow and see if speaking rather than typing gets any better results. A manager is next on my list if that turns up nothing.

When i initially phoned to tell them about the initial damage, they said it might take a few days before the replacements would be dispatched. I specifically pointed out that i couldn't store the table anywhere other than outside and that if it rained then it was going to get wet. They said just try to keep it dry as best as possible which i have done by covering it with the boxes of the chairs we were going to keep. However they have taken so long to get the replacement out that it was inevitable that we were going to get some rain.

Like i said to start with, my objective is to get the replacements - i don't want to send the stuff back unless i have absolutely no other option.

Regarding the teak oil, we've only put it on the chairs that weren't damaged. We haven't put any on the items that are being returned.

Mark_Hewitt

When returning rejected or faulty goods you are obliged to keep them in safe conditions where they are not going to be damaged. I doubt outside counts in that regard.

wife-spent-it-all

Mark_Hewitt wrote: »

When returning rejected or faulty goods you are obliged to keep them in safe conditions where they are not going to be damaged. I doubt outside counts in that regard.

Maybe you're right but i had no other choice and had they dispatched the replacements straight away there wouldn't have been a problem because we were having all that nice sunshine 2 weeks ago. One would think that a wooden table and chair set for the garden would be ok outside for a week or two, however the same cannot be said for the box!

I had an automated email a few hours ago to say the replacement items were finally on the way to me - its only taken them 14 days to do that :shocked:

wife-spent-it-all

Final update - the replacement table and chair arrived and once again the table was in a box that had came open on the journey. Luckily this time the box hadn't opened quite as much as last time so the contents had remained under control and the table was acceptable.

The replacement chair however was again damaged in a separate spot to the one being sent back, but at this point i had lost all interest in pursuing yet another replacement because i want to make use of this stuff this year not in 2010. Had i not already sent back the first chair with the courier who delivered the replacements, i would have swapped the bits around to make one good one.

The company in question was greenfingers.com and i wont ever be using them in future and i wouldn't recommend them to anyone else either. They did provide a £40 refund but this only brought the total cost of the item to just below what we had originally seen it advertised the week before we ordered it so they are hardly making a loss on it.

I did submit a review of the product and their service onto their website about 2 weeks ago but its no suprise to me that it's not been published as it wasnt exactly complimentary in nature.