Comet

Poor payment service and Customer Support

After bad shopping experiences with Comet many years ago (approx 20years ago), receiving nothing but bad customer service and faulty goods, I swore never to use Comet again. Recently I had an incident which resulted in me receiving Comet vouchers for replacement goods, so reluctantly I returned to Comet.co.uk to select a replacement item and settled upon a Macbook Air 128GB at £1099.00. I kept monitoring the site noticing that these items were never in stock in stores and you could only buy online to be collected in store.

When there was a 5% discount online (5LAPTOP code) I went to buy the product hoping to save £54.95 on the purchase price. I also went to Comet.co.uk though TopCashBack who were offering a further 2.52% cash back on items purchased through Comet.co.uk. This should have given me a total discount on the full price of £81.26 (5% off £1099 = £1044.05 less 2.52% = £1017.74). I had a £919 card voucher and an £80 sms voucher from Direct Validation Services on behalf of my insurer.

When ordering online I noticed there was no way to input my voucher codes so I called the phone ordering number. I was told the card voucher was not valid online and the SMS voucher was not valid online or on the phone. So I had a voucher which could not be used for the product I required.

The telephone ordering people suggested I pay the SMS voucher value using my bank card and they will deliver the goods then I can exchange the SMS voucher for a card voucher in store, call them back and they will credit my account back with the money for the voucher.

On visiting the store yesterday evening I was told that that is not possible without stopping the order. Getting quite frustrated by this point I will be returning to the store tonight to get the cash credited to my account. I think that at this point I'll be told that this is not possible and they will only be able to give me comet vouchers in return for this. I would say that if this turns out to be the case I have been defrauded out of £80 and will be looking for legal advice on this matter.

All said and done, I think that after 20+ years Comet has proven it's self to be just as incompetent and customer service has been just as bad and hasn't improved at all throughout the life of the company. It obviously pays to have bad customer service and a very disjointed payment process which only works for standard payment processing as Comet has been in business throughout. I can only assume there is some relationship with insurance companies which keeps Comet running and would be interested to see what percentage of Comets business is through insurance replacements.