Avoid Pixmania
Thinking of buying a phone? Avoid Pixmania.
It’s rare I get such a poor customer experience that I feel the need to warn the thousands of people who read this blog every day. However, yesterday I ordered a LG KS20 (Windows Mobile) for testing because I was having reports of problems running an application I have written, on this particular phone.
First of all, at the checkout Pixmania automatically added "Zen Engagement" for an extra £25. This is advertised as "A refund in case your product malfunctions, product trade-ins, accessories at great prices". There’s no intuitive way at the checkout to remove this. What you have to do is click on ‘Find out more’, scroll to the bottom and select ‘I do not subscribe to the Zen Engagement‘. This is very devious and doing a Google search on this I can see it has caught a few people out.
The order with Pixmania went through OK and I even went through the online Verified by Visa password process. A few moments later I received an email order confirmation. Today I received an email saying…
"Following a standard verification carried out by our online insurance partners, we regret to inform you that we are unable to process your order. We have therefore proceeded in cancelling this order. Please do not hesitate to contact our customer service team on 08700 118 117"
Online insurance partners? What are they?
So I tried their telephone number several times only to be cut off every time I was about to exit the call queue and talk to customer service.
So I tried the email contact form on their web site asking what information the ‘Online insurance partners’ had provided to make my order invalid after they had taken payment successfully.
Here’s the email response I received…
"Due to the security reasons your order has been cancelled. Please contact your bank in order to make a charge back."
No explanation. Just an explicit statement that they have cancelled the order and are keeping my money!
Under European data protection law companies have to divulge information they have on you. I’ll be following this route as well as having to obviously contact my card company for a chargeback on Monday when they are ‘open’ again.
UPDATE: Spoke to my card company and they said they can’t dispute the transaction for 30 days.
UPDATE: Finally got through to Pixmania via another number and the Customer Service person said they couldn’t access my records - could I ring back another time? Asked them to ring me back and they said that’s not possible - they said they are an inbound service only.
UPDATE: Due to this blog post, the assistant supervisor for the Northern European team for Pixmania contacted me. I have an apology, my payment has been cancelled, and I have been offered a £20 voucher to use on their website.