Pre-order Items

Minkymarles

Hi everyone , hopefully someone can help me out, I've had my bank cards cancelled due to fraudulent activity , through no fault of my own . Unfortunately I have got a few items on a pre-order that I've secured  using the bank card to pay for , including limited edition records that are now sold out and no longer available to pre-order . Having had one pre-order already cancelled by the online store because they couldn't clear the pre-ordered payment ,  I was told to re-order and pay again. I've emailed customer support and all they've said is that they can't amend any orders. As some items aren't available anymore , can they just cancel the order? therefore leaving me without the items. I've done all I can do and am now stuck as they don't actually have a contact phone number for me to speak to someone to explain. Any advice would be appreciated thanks. 
Simon.

soolin

I suspect they can as without payment you have failed to maintain your part of the contract. My OH buys a lot of pre order items (not records though) and the sites he uses tend to phone him if his card is out of date or something and he does get the option to supply a new card - but the fact you can find no way to contact them seems a bit suspicious. 

How long did you have before your cards were cancelled and the items being available ? Do you have another card you could have ordered with or added to your existing order? 

Minkymarles

Hi Soolin , thanks for your reply. The issue I've got is a bit complicated as all was fine until last week when my bank contacted me about fraudulent activity on my debit card. After a couple of hours on the phone the bank cancelled the card and issued another one, which as yet hasn't arrived. I then contacted the customer support and got a reply on Friday saying that if I want to amend the order I to cancel and re-order , bit of an issue as they're now sold out . I changed all payments that I could to a credit card inc my Google pay and PayPal. Unfortunately for me the credit card company contacted me today to advise of unusual activity at 04:00 this morning followed by five (5) others amounting to nearly £1000 !! Having now had that card cancelled I'm left without a payment method. Both cards had at least 3yrs to run which wouldn't have been a problem. So as you can see it's a tricky one, especially as a couple of the records are on ebay for £500+ each rather than the £14:99 I pre-ordered at . 
Hope this helps
Simon.

Sandtree

Read the T&Cs that you agreed to when you purchased, almost all online retailers will have terms that no contract is formed until the goods are dispatched. Without a contract in place you have little/no grounds to hold them liable. 

As with Soolin, you'd expect a small company maybe would pick up the phone and ask for other payment details. A big company will have automated rules that either bounce the payment and move it on to a wait list of customers or send an auto email with link to update payment (as Amazon does). Companies between the two extremes will vary considerable and their systems simply may not be setup for doing things like changing payment methods on existing orders (I know when I did web dev years ago its not something a single person asked for). 

Minkymarles

Hi  Santree, many thanks , I know large companies don't care as there's always some else that will pay . All together it's 4 orders from 2 different online stores which both come under the same main company. I did look through the T's and C's and it says to contact them to alter/change an order , I do realise that doesn't mean they have to do anything to help me out but a little bit of understanding from them wouldn't hurt , but then again I'm just another customer... 
Thanks
Simon.

TELLIT01

If the supplier can't get the payment using the bank details you supplied, they aren't going to send the goods.  You are in an unusual situation but I don't see any way round it if the supplier says they are unable to amend the payment details.

Sandtree

Minkymarles said:
a little bit of understanding from them wouldn't hurt , but then again I'm just another customer... 

Its often more of an issue of "computer says no" than anything else... In a world where price is king the result is deskilling and de-empowering staff by giving them rigid systems. 99.99% of customers will be served more quickly and cheaply as a result but the 0.01% will have issues and the business will have to decide if its worth investing in trying to help those customers or accept their loss. The other problem is that 0.01% typically dont all have the same problem and so you get into ever diminishing returns as you deal with ever rarer situations like cards being reported as stolen/fraudulant, refunds required but fund source bank now sanctioned etc.

As a former customer service agent (many years ago now) I transitioned from a green screen system that was terrible to use but gave me free reign to help customers in almost anyway to a windows based question tree system that robbed me of all authority. It did however mean that when a 10% discount was accepted by a customer that they got a 10% discount because how the system worked it meant due to agent error lots of people got a 90% discount instead 

 meant that all the goods accidentally sold for 10% of their price rather than 10% discounted due to the different ways your did an ItmRed depending where you were in the system almost certainly recouped the goodwill lost from customers when more sensible commercial decisions were taken than what some agents were known for doing.