Next Flowers - Valentine's Day Delivery Screw Ups

bobby_g_3

Ordered a bouquet of roses from Next Flowers as per the links from Martin's Email.

Billed £20 + £3.75. T&Cs stipulated that you had to take a sting for the Next catalogue at £3.75, but the next one could be cancelled. Ok, agreed to that. Local florists were charging £64.99 just for 12 roses! M&S and John Lewis deals were done by that time.

Completed the purchase process, including connection to Verified by Visa, and on screen confirmation that the order had been processed. Was then dumped back at the Home Page of Next Flowers. All looked fine.

Got one email through which confirmed Next Directory Application, but no sales confirmation was immediate. Didn't stay on the machine long to wait for that.

Anyway, no delivery arrived.

Spoke to Next.

Turns out their system logged the order as a failure, so it never went through. Their system wasn't programmed to alert me of a failure though, so I was totally none the wiser. I would have had to have inferred the failure by way of a lack of sales confirmation.

I have complained to Next Flowers today. They apologised, admitted there's a problem with the site and confirmed I have not been charged nor have I been signed up to the Next catalogue.

Nothing confirmed in writing though.

They said that they are sending me a £20 Next gift voucher to the house by way of apology.

If you have had this problem I suggest you follow up immediately with Next on + 44 (0)844-844-8888.

They really need to sort their system out. Really amateur process they have in place and raises some questions about how my payment could be processed but no further anything happened down the line and I wasn't told and no one their end took remedial action in time to fix, even though the system was recording faults.