AN ELUSIVE CHRISTMAS GIFT

For us, online shopping at Christmas was the thing to do this year.  Because we are in the US, many online retailers offer free shipping and that makes everything much easier than going out to the busy stores and malls.  My little story started with us looking around in a major department store where Stuart tried on a Levi’s faux-leather hooded jacket that he liked very much.  Rather than buying it right away and having to stash it in the truck (he would know what’s up), I decided that I would order it online.

So back at home, I ordered the jacket online and used a promotion code to get a discount which should have resulted in a great deal.  The billing address box wouldn’t allow a Canadian province or postal code so I tried to trick it using Arizona and our postal code converted to a US zip code (use the 3 postal code numbers followed by 2 zeros).  This zip code conversion has worked many times and has always worked at the gas pumps, when they ask for a zip code.  Anyway, I received an e-mail a day or two later saying that my order was rejected.  I phoned a customer service person and was able to place a new order with my credit card and he gave me an additional discount.  Now I was a happy online shopper again.

Then a couple of days later, I received another e-mail saying that my latest order had been rejected.  Now things were getting a bit confused and as Stuart and I share one e-mail address, it was getting hard to keep this a secret.  I sent a note to the customer service address asking for clarification on the orders:  have they both been rejected?  They promised a response within 48 hours so I waited.  In the meantime, we found out that we had reached our limit on the credit card so I assumed that was why the order was rejected.

I really wanted the jacket so I went ahead and placed a new order through a customer representative again using the department store’s credit card this time.  He assured me that the order was successfully placed and I regularly checked the order status with the tracking number.  About a week later, the status changed from “approved” to “fulfillment” so I was confident that it was going ahead.  Then I received an e-mail response to my very first note saying that the order was rejected and I’d have to try again.  At first I was sure that they were talking about the original two orders but they specifically quoted the newest order number as being rejected.  Now what should I do?

I printed all the order forms and e-mail notes and headed off to the local store to see if I could just find the jacket in the store and make a purchase at the double discounted price.  Well, they didn’t have the jackets in the store anymore and when I went back to check online, they said the item was out of stock.  At this point, Stuart has figured out what is going on and we both assumed that there would be no jacket for Christmas.

The very next day, I received an e-mail indicating that the jacket would be delivered tomorrow.  Now this had been about 4 weeks from the original order date and I was excited to finally get the package.  I opened it the next morning to check it out and found out that they had shipped a size SMALL instead of XL.  Argghhh!!

The jacket had to be returned one way or another so we drove back to the store where we’d originally seen the jacket to make the return.  We went into the jacket section first to see if there were any left in stock and sure enough, there was THE JACKET in the right size.  I had Stuart try it on again to be sure of the fit and then we made the exchange at the customer service counter.  Yahoo!!  Success!!  The jacket didn’t get wrapped for Christmas but I did present it to him that morning.

So it all worked out, the right jacket at a double discounted price but it was an incredible adventure getting it.  I’m still in favour of online shopping in spite of the pitfalls.