Uber Eats DID EVENTUALLY refund unprocessed grocery order

sourpuss2021

I'm really shocked by this experience and hope it can be resolved but it sounds like it won't be by Uber Eats who are refusing to do the right thing.

At 5pm on the 25th, I placed a £28 order with fast grocery firm 'Jiffy' via the Uber Eats app.    Just after 6.30pm there was obviously something wrong so I phoned Jiffy.   They told me that they had not received the order details or the payment from Uber Eats.   So they would not be fulfilling it.  (They use their own riders and also have their own standalone app which I didn't then know about).

So I phoned Uber Eats straight after and spoke to a CS agent, which I was only able to do because their system showed me as having a live order.   I said he needed to issue me with a refund, because the funds had already been held from my credit card. 

He said he would not do this, because he said that the 'hold' would automatically expire and the funds would not be claimed by Uber Eats, so I would get the money back. (which I know happens with cancelled orders elsewhere).

However at 8pm the order - I think automatically - was marked as 'completed'.   At this stage it would not be possible for me to have reached them on the phone again as my order was no longer showing as live.

On 26th-28th the transaction remained 'Pending' on my credit card and I believed it would be like this for 3-5 days and then expire.   Then came the weekend.   But then on 31st the transaction stopped being pending, but became fully processed. UberEats had taken the money!

I got Jiffy on the phone again and they said the order had never made it to their system, but they could see it on UberEats.   The UberEats app now makes it impossible for me to claim a refund because they say it is more than 48 hours since I made the order!   I tried multiple times to explain the situation using the few lines that you can submit on the app.   But CS would not deal with me, they would not phone me, they just sent me a few infuriating lines saying they simply refused to do anything because it's more than 48 hours!

I'd paid by Mastercard so I've reported it to the Disputes team on the card I used.though haven't spoken to them yet.  I will phone them today to see if they have enough evidence from me.  All I was able to supply them was call logs showing the times at which I had phoned Uber Eats and Jiffy.   And I  also suggested they could phone Jiffy.   But since the UberEats app shows the order as 'Completed' a screenshot of that wouldn't help.

I guess my other option would be small claims court?  Or phoning Jiffy every day until they step up?

I don't have an active Twitter account but I do see UberEats have an account there, maybe I could try contacting them if they reply to new/empty accounts.

Right now I am just shocked that UberEats have shamelessly stolen my money when it's an open-and-shut case of an order not having been fulfilled, and them having been alerted to this and of the need to issue a refund within two hours of the order having been placed.

Jenni_D

Just raise a chargeback claim through your card provider, and/or raise it as a disputed transaction (which you already have).

Small claims court is a last resort - this should be resolvable well before that.  

sourpuss2021

Thanks, Jenni_D.   Yes, I hope you're right.   I spoke to a general customer service person at the card company who explained that the Disputes team will have 72 hours to investigate it.  

It's just shocking that in such an open-and-shut case of an order not being fulfilled and there being a clear explanation for why it wasn't chased further by me within 48 hours, UberEats won't engage.  I can't remember ever experiencing such bad behaviour by a firm operating in the UK.   And I'm with Virgin Media!!

Sandtree

At the moment you are blaming Uber Eats but you don't know why the order was marked as complete... it could be that Jiffy went into the system and marked it as complete to clear it off the system as they get penalised for rejecting orders. Whilst it would be more annoying having to email them after the order is complete it would have been the better route than sitting back and waiting several days to see what happens to the payment...

I've had orders that were sat as in progress for a couple of hours and then within seconds of each other changed to out for delivery and then delivered/complete. In those cases raising a "problem" in the Uber Eats has resulted in a fairly quick response and a full refund.

As Jenni says, the first case is to raise a dispute however if the merchant shows that Jiffy marked it as delivered then the prospects wont be great.

sourpuss2021

Thanks for your thoughts Sandtree. 

It happened another time earlier in January that I never received an order placed with Jiffy via UberEats.   I got through to Jiffy on the phone and they said they had no trace of the order.

What I did that time was at the 3-hour point when it was marked as 'Completed' in UberEats, I immediately sent a message to Uber using the form.    That time they did engage with me by email and issued me a refund.  I believe that orders are automatically marked as 'Completed' unless they are cancelled by the restaurant/shop, but perhaps this is more complicated when it's a third-party company with its own infrastructure like Jiffy and they haven't received details of the order on their system at all.

This previous experience is why when I spoke to them on the 25th I said they needed to issue a refund.  But I believed their assurance that it wasn't necessary.

I really don't think that Jiffy are involved in this process, it's all UberEats.   Jiffy just don't get the order sent over to them, it's invisible on their system.  There's obviously a software integration issue somewhere along the line.

Sandtree

sourpuss2021 said:

I really don't think that Jiffy are involved in this process, it's all UberEats.   Jiffy just don't get the order sent over to them, it's invisible on their system.  There's obviously a software integration issue somewhere along the line.

Well that depends on who owns the integration with UberEats system... I would have thought Uber require that their system is the master record (at least for anyone smaller than a national supermarket chain) and whilst integration is possible with third party systems the vendor takes the risk in doing so.

I'd also be surprised if the system defaults to "complete" if there has been no response from vendor to even acknowledge the order. I know with Deliveroo's system it auto rejects the order if the vendor doesn't acknowledge the order within X time (from memory its about 1 hr). Obviously what none of us know is where the failure happened... it could be Jiffy's system acknowledged the order but didnt write it to their system correctly which is exactly why Uber would say their system remains the master record.