I think I ended with a moral victory of sorts. But this is a warning to be careful, and some info about dealing with Buy.com. May be amusing. Maybe I'm crazy. Or both.
I bought two thumb drives, and had to go though Customer Service hell to get Buy.com to honor their free shipping offer. To be fair, I probably went through the checkout twice (I don't remember doing it, but what with being sidetracked to create a Google Checkout account...) and missed, the presumed second time - I caught it once - the fact that they had defaulted to "standard" shipping despite using free ("basic") shipping in calculating your "total price", which I think is pretty sleazy.
Anyway, I emailed them (and Google) within minutes of getting my confirmation email (though maybe not - I wrote Google first - within the 15 minutes (!) I was told later you are given to cancel an order) to tell them to revise the shipping or cancel my order. They acknowledged three hours later and replied four days later to say that my order couldn't be revised after being submitted, but that I could return the item. (Again, to be fair, four days later meant December 22nd, so we're talking about crush time just before Christmas.)
Returning the thumb drives, paying a 15% restocking fee and shipping both ways, wasn't much of an option in response to my complaint about the shipping fee. (I note that another complaning customer on this website got Buy.com to send him a prepaid label to return his shipment, but Buy.com ignored my offer to void the whole deal if they paid for the return.) I told them that four times, and four more times that was the only option they offered me. The response that was most baldly unresponsive was the one that read "We are happy to assist you with any questions you may have regarding your order. However, the email you sent us does not contain any information or questions." The four paragraphs I'd written in response to the last time I'd been told I could return the thumb drives were embedded in the text at an appropriate point, and were kind of hard to miss if one looked.
Anyway, there must be some count of communications that I exceeded because eventually they sent me their Customer Service number, which I understand is not on their website, so here it is: 1-877-780-2464. WARNING! They say this is 24/7 but after waiting on hold and talking to someone with a Chinese accent for some time he finally admitted he couldn't help me but though maybe a "supervisor" could... But "supervisors" only work 9-5 PST, so I needed to call back in an hour or so.
Obviously the off-hour "Customer Service" is just a placebo. You need to get stateside to even begin to hope to get something accomplished.
The problem with calling back during business hours is that you have to listen to a smooth jazz loop longer just to get to Hong Kong (Singapore?) and then longer still to get a 9-to-5 "supervisor" who can't do anything either (quite apart from not supervising anyone) and longer still to get a "manager". Who doesn't have access to your emails (he's "telephone", not "email")... Don't do this unless you've got a speakerphone, an hour-and-a-half block of time, and something else to do while waiting. But, hey, the "manager" (telephone) was able to contact the email side of the operation and find the email I'd filled out on the Buy.com website! And I had indeed told them to revise or cancel in plenty of time! So I've been promised my $6.03 (plus $0.04 tax — tax? Must be tax on about $0.50... What's that about? $. 50 markup on or kickback from FedEx? The reason for not defaulting to "basic"?) back to my credit card. We'll see. And maybe I'll get my mail-in rebate too. Moral victory, I guess.
Any chance of getting a class-action lawyer to look at this business of advertising free shipping but defaulting to marked-up shipping? The ripped-off aren't likely to get more than coupons, but if it's worth enough in aggregate for Buy.com to be sleazy maybe the lawyer can make a bundle doing good.
Andrew
San Francisco, California
U.S.A.
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