Play.com contact email

ghpst

We have just used play.com for the first time. When the package was delivered, the courier left it outside our house in the pouring rain. The packaging was totally destroyed and the books were all soaked. After drying them over the radiator, they were legible but definitely no longer new! I felt that it was not worth the costs (we live in Belgium) to post everything back to the UK but was not too happy with the service provided.

I contacted play.com yesterday on customercare@play.com. Within 3 hours they responded and by this morning they had replied once again with a credit voucher as compensation. All they needed were photos as proof of damage.

Definitely good aftersales service in my opinion.

Elektriksheep

I bought an item from Play.com recently - the box it was delivered in was in perfect condition, but the box within that had been opened and re-sealed with double-sided selotape - perhaps someone in their warehouse has been tampering with things? The item inside the re-sealed box was damaged.

I returned the item to them to get a replacement but was only refunded part of the return postage (their returns policy says they will refund return p&p if the item was faulty or damaged). I believe "MrB3nn" (above) had the same problem. I paid £2.60 return postage (2nd class recorded delivery) and only received £1.40 refund. At no point was I asked how much return p&p cost me. I still have the receipt from the postoffice.

After receiving the replacement item from Play.com I opened it to find that I had received a new product (definitely not the same product as before) but which had also been opened and re-sealed with double-sided selotape. The item inside again was damaged in a similar way to the first.

I returned this second item to them to get a refund and again was only refunded £1.40 instead of £2.60.

I will be contacting Play.com via the email addresses listed above. I will let the forum know if I receive any sort of response.

tafkas_2

Play have a standard refund which is all you will get unless you provide proof that you paid more (how they expected me to send back a 22kg item for £1.40 is anyones guess!) - see below:

Thank you for returning your item to Play.com.

It is our usual policy to refund £1.40/3 Euros as standard to cover postage costs. We are happy to refund postage costs which exceed this on product of a receipt of postage costs confirming the amount.

Please can you send a copy of your receipt to us either by fax or email, and we will process your requests.

Elektriksheep

Yesterday I sent the following email to "info@play.com", "customercare@play.com", "helpdesk@play.com"...

"Hi. Thank you for processing my refund. It is much appreciated. I have returned two products to you now, and I have been refunded £1.40 (for the postage and packing) for each product. However, I sent each product back to you using recorded delivery, as requested, which cost me £2.60 per item. Therefore I am still owed an extra £1.20 per item - a total of £2.40. I would greatly appreciate it if this could also be refunded.

Many thanks."

I received an immediate automated response from "customercare@play.com" giving me a ticket number.

At 10:22 today I received the following email from "info@play.com"...

"Your return request has now been processed and your postage costs refunded
to your credit/debit card. This refund should be visible on your
statement within the next 3 working days.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused to you in this
matter and thank you for your patience and valued custom.

Kind Regards,

Play"


I checked my Play.com account (order history section) and my refunds have already been processed.

Overall I'm pretty disappointed that I received two consecutive pre-opened and damaged items, but their customer service has been really good to be fair to them.

majorj0nny

I used to be an avid fan of play.com - and always sung their praises, unfortunately on the few occasions Ive had to return items ive ran into the poor excuse of what play refers to as its customer service department.

originally I bought a star wars lightsaber from play - a collectors item and as such you would hope for the box to be in good condition. unfortuantely play sent this with a small blue plastic bag wrapped round the center of the box, just something to stick the postage label to. as a result the box was scuffed and crushed, not to mention the saber itself was physically bent.

plays phone support at the time (about a year or 2 ago this was) was shocking. the person on the end of the phone was rude, sarcastic and obviously didnt care about the customer one bit.

I pleaded for the thing to be sent in better packaging and each time I got a replacement more battered up than the last - eventually I gave up and just demended a refund.

postage costs were silly, and refunding them was a nightmarish task, the goon on the customer care line made the flippant comment "how are we supposed to know how much it cost you to post" ... we replied with "well for a start its written on the package itself..." he pointed out that obviously we should have faxed them the postage reciept ? never was this mentioned anywhere , and I dont think at the time there was even a fax number ? after numerous big email complaints fell on deaf ears, I sent letters - really p1ssed off that Id been treated so poorly, praying for some sort of sign that the letters/emails are going further than being just chucked in someone bin! . i gave up eventually after not recieving any resonse, after that I was determined to only use play if no where else sold the item I wanted.

fast forward to last month, I wanted a powerball electric starter, could only find it on play at the time so bought it from them. I was utterly unimpressed with this thing when I got it, the battery was plugged in when I got it and it could not spin my powerball up to the correct starting speed, so I has to assume play had sent me a second hand device.

going through plays returns process , i ticked it as faulty and filled in the description of the fault, and said i wanted a refund... "page not found" on submission, I tried over the next few days from numerous ISPs and PCs i have access too, same problem, eventually i had to email them (again a painful crypton factor task finding that thing on their site !) emailed them as to my woes and got a reply giving me a return code, and asking me to send this recorded,etc ... again I included a letter specifying i wanted a refund, a week later I got a replacement item sent out ? and to make matter worse, they refunded me £1.40 where in reality it cost £2.37 to send ?? had they just guessed this amount ? had they worked out standard 1st class postage without recorded ? or had I sent it in some kind of too expensive postage form ??

so again I have to return this - yet more expense. they are the sort of company that you can imagine, based on the way they have treated me in the past, that if i sent it standard postage, they would just claim they hadnt recived it ... like it was some kind of scrupulous in-house policy ?

anyway - tried filling in their rubbishy online returns form again - again got the page not found type page, tried again and it worked the second time.

ive sent them an email complaint about all this via the first email address in this thread.

i can see the problem here - play.com has grown so large and so departmentalised now that the dispatch depo has zero contact with other departments, the usual monkey tree of managers and submanagers and devisions and never the twain shall meet.

perhaps someone needs write a youtube ditty to knock em some share prices down till they suddenly 'become interested' in customer service ?

majorj0nny

Elektriksheep wrote: »

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused to you in this
matter and thank you for your patience and valued custom.

Kind Regards,

Play"

yeah - they seem to bang that comment around as meaninglessly as them just coughing in your face - from what ive seen no one at play actually 'cares' for the customers past getting their money, and no one at play seems bothered about incovnenience or even making up for any inconvenience caused.

I stated off wondering if I could get some kind of £5 compensation - some flippant voucher "yeah yeah shutup" type thing.... but after emails, phone calls and letters it became more important to me to get evidence that anyone at play was even reading these complains other than just chucking them into the bin.

Doc_N

The worst thing about Play is their 28 day returns policy:

They even use it to get out of dealing with faulty goods, and even if your expensive new TV packs up after just 5 weeks, they won't give you any help.

No Sale of Goods legislation to protect you, because it's a Jersey company and there's still no protection for consumers..

Buy from Play only if you're happy to deal with the manufacturer under the warranty to deal with faults, and pay all the carriage etc - Play won't help you at all after 28 days.

Gareth_Jones_4

Thanks for the contact address, I have emailed them due to non postage of the item ordered. I got a ticket number and now will have to wait a bit. Have to say that my previous transactions with them went very well.

ghostgate2001

Thanks for the info re: Play.com contact email address. I'll give it a try.

Honestly, Play.com's customer service is the pits. No wonder they refuse to even give you a means of contacting them by email. It's just part of the overall picture of not giving a damn about the customer. They're all well and good until you run into a problem and it's only then that you find out what a wretched experience it is trying to get any satisfaction out of them. Wait 21 days, sign this form we post out to you, wait without your item while we take our sweet time 'testing' it, etc, etc. Play.com are only interested in Play.com.

My third (and final!) bad experience with Play: I pre-ordered a videogame back on June 5th - one I was looking forward to very much - and release day was Friday September 4th, so I pre-ordered it 3 whole months in advance. Thursday lunchtime, the day before release, I was concerned that my game hadn't been mailed out yet. I checked and it was in "Packing." Fair enough, I thought, there's still time to get it sent out today. But when I got home that evening, I checked again and it was still in "Packing" - and clearly not going to reach me on release day any more. So I went to cancel the order, but you can't cancel an order that is in "Packing"!

To cut a long story short, they kept the item in the uncancellable "Packing" stage for THREE straight days, eventually sending it out on Saturday, the day after release. That's one heck of a job those packers must've been doing! I look forward to seeing their work... I say "look forward to" because it's now Tuesday evening, most of my friends have been playing the game for 5 days already, and I still haven't received the damn thing.

This strikes me as very dodgy, the way they put the item into an uncancellable so-called "Packing" stage for several days, thereby preventing me from doing what I wanted to do, i.e. take my business elsewhere as soon as it became clear Play weren't going to deliver. And, on top of that, they rendered themselves uncontactable so I couldn't even make them cancel it. I'm not ringing some 0845 number, spending good money after bad.

Needless to say, I just took great pleasure in cancelling all of my other pre-orders with Play.com, totalling some £180 - plus untold future business. As others have said on this thread, Amazon's customer service is so much better: they are fully contactable, responsive to queries, rarely screw up, and most importantly of all they sort things out ASAP if anything does go wrong.

superscaper

Doc_N wrote: »

No Sale of Goods legislation to protect you, because it's a Jersey company and there's still no protection for consumers..

Buy from Play only if you're happy to deal with the manufacturer under the warranty to deal with faults, and pay all the carriage etc - Play won't help you at all after 28 days.

Just thought I'd point out that this is now no longer true. There's just as much protection under Jersey law now.

There's the Distance Selling (Jersey) Law 2007 (equivalent to Distance Selling Regulations in UK) and Supply of Goods and Service (Jersey) Law 2009 (this is equivalent to the Sale of Goods Act and was only just brought into force on 1st Sept).

The only real difference now as far as I can tell is that where there's a limit of reasonable time up to 6 years to make a claim in England and Wales, it is 10 years in Jersey.