Monday 27 October 2008

Eve Store - A bit Off topic, but need to rant.

Is there anyone out there who has ordered anything from the new eve store ?

I placed an order for some back issues of Eon magazine and after going through the motions (and only being able to order 1 item at a time thanks to the lousy interface) chose a 4 issue subscription since it's said that you can order 4 issues at once through that if you choose for instance issue 1, you will get sent issues 1 to 4.

Upon attempting to process the order, I got a failed message, stating that the server couldn't be contacted, and to try again later. After waiting 10 minutes and trying again, I got the same message so gave up on it as a bad idea.

Fast forward a week later, and I recieved my credit card bill, with 2 transactions on it from the Eve store.

Email sent to them to try and gather what has happened, and without getting a response from CCP or whoever runs the store, I recieved a forwarded email from Ian in MMMPublishing (those who produce Eon) to say to me that they had recieved the payment details, but as the request came through without any other info, they couldn't access it to process.

After explaining that they were happy enough to send me 8 issues instead of the 4 I had ordered (as the 2 payments had come through) they couldn't cancel one or refund it as there was no order number attached to send back to CCP to get them to refund the card.

Ultimately, I had wanted to eventually buy the 12 back issues in 3 blocks of 4 that I had missed out on to date so I was happy enough to accept the 2 sets of 4, but what worries me is what would have happened if I had kept on trying to process the payment and had 5, or even 10 payment requests on there. It seems I would have struggled to get a refund on the unrequired payments, and personally think it's a rather shoddy practice. It's making me worry about placing the order for the other 4 issues I need. It seems that MMMPublishing, though they have been very helpful in progressing the matter are a bit limited in that they can only process orders received through the eve store, which I have reservations about using again.

I'm still waiting for the 8 issues to be sent out to me, 10 days after I was told they would be despatched now they know who the order is for, which is a bit of a long time considering the amount that is charged for delivery when normally you would expect only 3 to 5 days, but I know that MMMPublishing is busy trying to process the EON13 shipments at the moment so I'm not too worried that it's taking so long, but hopefully soon I will hear from them and be able to make a decision over getting the remaining 4 issues.

Anyone else had any experience with the Eve store (new or old) and had any other issue with them, or have I just had a (hopefully) rare bad experience ?

2 comments:

Bahamut said...

I've never had a problem, and I'm a regular subscriber to E-ON. Best thing to do with online transactions mistakes of this nature is to re-try the next day.

Hopefully I'll be buying the Faction ship model set soon.

Anonymous said...

I had the same experience with them and that was before they made the changes to the store. Ultimately, I got my EON magazines, it took over 2 months for them to show up.