DVDi.co.uk
– a personal experience
by
DVDi.co.uk promise free worldwide delivery of DVDs and other entertainment media – very handy if you're an expat and want to catch up on a bit of UK telly nostalgia. So we signed up to DVDi's affiliate programme in early November 2006. However, before recommending the service to others we thought we should try it for ourselves.
According to the promotional blurb, they
offer superb value DVDs, CDs, & Games delivered FREE WORLDWIDE and not just limited to the UK or Europe! DVDi are also backed by the largest media distribution company in the UK who are dedicated to delivering product on time, first time!
It sounded pretty good. We put in our first order on 8 November, for three items. They all arrived in good shape, although we were a bit surprised that they arrived in separate packages – and that the bill came from an organisation called Connections Online rather than from DVDi themselves. And that DVDi's supposed "free delivery" price was actually more expensive than the cost of the item and shipping charged by Connections Online (for instance, one of the three items came in at £17.58, although Connections Online's bill was for a total of £16.89). Oh well, we thought, it's still not a bad price.
Things started to go wrong with our second order. We'd planned to send DVDs as gifts to friends. However, when I tried to place an order on 4 December there was no option to select a different address in the checkout process. I tried to cancel the order and start afresh, but there was no option to do that either.
I raised this with DVDi's Customer Services (the company's only point of contact apparently being an email address: info@dvdi.co.uk.) They replied on the same day:
Apologies for the delay getting back to you; firstly, the deliveries are sent in individual packages to save you the charges for VAT for our warehouse in Jersey, secondly I have cancelled your order as requested and finally your first 3 orders have to be send [sic] to the cardholders [sic] billing address which is a restriction from Natwest Streamline due to credit card fraud. After we have processed 3 orders you can have alternative delivery addresses.
OK, I thought, I'll put in two more orders immediately and then go ahead with the gift orders. No such luck – the shopping cart insisted on a clear week between orders. (Neither this nor the requirement for the first three orders to go to the billing address was made clear in the Terms and Conditions – at the time of writing (23 January 2007) the link on their website takes you to a page with a blank box headed "Customer Service".) I asked on 8 December if the block could be lifted manually, but got no reply. So I had to wait until 11 December to put in a third order. However, I was reluctant to put in any further orders until that one had arrived.
It was just as well that I did. On 20 December I was surprised to get a package through the post containing a piece of paper with details of the cancelled order, but also a DVD which I'd never even heard of, let alone ordered! I wrote immediately suggesting that I send back the DVD intact in its original shrinkwrapping, but asking for confirmation that I would be refunded both the cost of the DVD and the postage.
I chased again on 22 December. I finally got a reply on 6 January, asking if I had received the replacement DVD. I replied that I hadn't received the DVD for my third order, and that I still had the wrong DVD from the cancelled order; what did they want me to do with that?
No reply again. I chased on 20 January and again on 24 January, when I finally got an answer that I would indeed get a refund of both the DVD price and the postage. Great, I thought – time to put in the next order. However, when I went to do this I found that the price of the DVDs I wanted to order had now nearly doubled. And, in the process, I discovered that my third order was showing on DVDi's website simply as "ordered" – not "despatched".
I wrote to DVDi again, asking once more about my unsent order. I also said how disappointed I was that it had taken them so long to resolve these problems. Our plan to send gifts for the New Year had been defeated partly because of requirements which we weren't aware of, and partly through their inaction – which would also leave us out of pocket as a result of their intervening price increase. We had been keen to promote DVDi through affiliate links on our websites, and the response to our first order had been encouraging, but we were now starting to wonder whether to warn our visitors off instead.
Within four minutes (remarkably promptly, given their earlier slowness to respond) they sent this reply, quoted in full:
We dispatch 2000 DVD's [sic] a week and have very few issues, please feel free to remove us from your site. We do not respond to threats of negative feedback and I would certainly be very causious [sic] should this be the route you wish to take taking into consideration only 1 order?
Regards
DVDi
Make your own minds up, but on the basis of our experience after three orders – not one – we certainly won't be using their service again (and, indeed, we've now removed their banner from this site).
Update: 7 February
Having heard nothing further about my unsent order of 11 December, I wrote to them again on 5 February pointing out that despite several enquiries and reminders it still apparently hadn't been despatched, and asked them to cancel the order. I also asked for a refund of any charge they had applied to my credit card (their information about ordering states on the one hand that charges are applied before items are sent, but on the other hand that no charge is applied until the order's despatched). No reply as of today, and the DVD still shows up as on order. This in spite of their claim that they normally despatch DVDs within 24 hours of ordering. I think it might be time to write to the Trading Standards people soon...
