Warning: Don’t order from E-buyer (review of ebuyer.com)

Busy executive? Run a small business? In a hurry?  Dont order from ebuyer.

Tempted by their cheaper than anywhere else prices for a Samsung 22″ monitor for my new graphics guru recently employed, I ordered from them last week.

1. I was going to pay on my personal card. They requested a copy of my PASSPORT and a bank statement. Annoyed, but wanting to simply get the goods, I complied and sent the scanned copies to their email address. Days later, still no delivery. We phoned;  they had no record and had canceled the order. We’d had no email or communication. FAIL No.1

2. we tried ordering again. This time I paid on my company mastercard; they didnt require the passport or bank statement this time, but they wouldn’t accept the order to be delivered to our London office, when the card was registered to our Cambridge office.

3. Reluctantly accepted to have delivery to the Cambridge office, so telephoned this time to ensure the order went smoothly. So we ordered BY PHONE and the guy said they would be delivered the next day, as they were in stock. I even paid extra for fast delivery.

Having arranged carraige from Cambridge to London, I called today to check things had arrived. NOTHING HAD ARRIVED. Tried to call, they had a cue of 9 people infront of me. Dug through my email, it turns out they sent a CANCELLATION OF ORDER EMAIL a couple of days ago; it had gone in my junk (good to know they use a good emailing service). The email gives NO useful information about why it is cancelled; the items were IN STOCK, so they cant be discontinued. We certainly did NOT cancel the order.

Summary of why not to order from ebuyer

3 attempts at ordering, over an hour wasted (atleast), many calls, emails and arranging of transport from Cambridge to London, and NOTHING to show for it.

In short:

• Poor communication
• fussy policies about delivery when other services all manage to provide sensible delivery criteria
• long waiting on the phone
• and the potential to be left furious at having wasted a vast amount of time and f***ing around.

And why am I writing this and using up more time? To save you making the same mistake. Its my only course of retort. Back to Amazon for me; I’ll pay the little extra, as atleast they deliver on-time and without the dance of the postal address ebuyer demand.

The email is all its useless glory, below:

Chinwag Podcast on Search & Location, now available

For those that missed the Chinwag Live: Search & Location Based Services on 7th Oct 2008, the PODCAST is now online, so if you missed it you can listen to myself and these other purveyors of all this locational, at via Feedburner, and also on iTunes. (in 3 parts) RSS & iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/57wuqh

In order, left to right:

Felix Petersen – Co-founder, Plazes / Head of Product Management, Social Activities, Nokia
Adrian Drury – Head of Commercial Strategy & Business Development, The Cloud
Chris Moisan – Product & Market Development Manager, Taptu / blog
Andrew Scott – Co-founder, Rummble
Peggy-Anne Salz – Chief Analyst & Producer, MSearchGroove
CHAIR: Jo Rabin – Consultant & Co-Founder of MoMo London

The iphone is good … but not that good.

As Paul Jozefak rightly points out on his blog, it is truly unreal that after all the bitching about lack of cut and paste, they have still left it out. Maybe it will be a Christmas present from them instead

That aside, I still rate the iphone as a fantastic piece of engineering. As a net device, or for apps, its truly fantastic. But as a phone, it truly sucks. Its still better than a Windows Mobile phone, but that isnt good enough – nor should that be a measurement of success!

The iphone came down from Heaven and thus they were all in a clammer.
(know this artist? I’d like to leave credit and link – please leave a comment if you know)

If a phone is going to be “a phone” then it has to do one thing well first: Be a phone.  That means decent battery life, and easy one hand operation for making calls. If I cant retrieve someone from my address book, in the dark with one hand (this is a test, not a regular use case for me and get the right number atleast 50% of the time, its a FAIL.

My life is too rushed, too busy, too many calls to be faffing around with both hands, head dug into my phone screen.

Lastly, there are other more subtle problems– Why do I have to go back to the SETTINGS screen to do basic config changes which I should able to access from with the current mode? Why cant I add a photo into an email, FROM the email I’m writing, rather than START from the photos gallery?…..I could go on.

Currently, I’ll have to carry my beloved Crackberry 8800, the best phone Ive owned in 5 years, and find space in my clothing for the beautiful but flawed iphone, too.

• Want to know about phones? use GSM Arena – fantastic free and well updated resource on phones old and new. Not an ad, I’ve just used it for years and its a great site!