Do not deal with Shopping Essentials? I do not feel that they are a reputable company; it appears that they use deceptive and dishonest practices to postpone and delay your receipt of value from the company. They also increased their annual membership fee over 20% which seems excessive for essentially the same service as in the previous year.
I knowingly signed up for an annual buyer club with Shopping Essentials while I was on the telephone with support from AOL. They explained the 30 day trail period and that if I did not cancelled during that period that I would be charged the annual fee of $99.95. Since I was promised a $50 Wal-Mart gift card and 20% discounts on additional gift cards I decided to take them up on the offer.
It turns out that there were a number of additional hoops to jump through that were required in order to receive the $50 Wal-Mart gift card. With waiting for the forms to fill out and then fulfillment time, it was well after the 30 day trail period elapsed before I received the Wal-Mart gift cards. I had the option of canceling at that point with the promise of a prorated refund of the annual fee. Time went by and I neglected to cancel the plan.
At the point close to the end of my first year, I decided to order enough gift cards to make the plan worth my original investment and my intention was to cancel the plan after I had received that value. Their stated process is to charge you for the full face value of the gift cards and then credit the 20% discount your account at the end of the month. I purchased a large number of gift cards on July 15. I checked on their delivery and processing a number of times before the end of the month, but was told that they didn't have any information about whether the cards had shipped or not. As it turns out, the cards arrived in a number of separate envelops over several days? All arrived before the end of July.
When I checked my credit card statement for the rebate that I should have received at the end of July, I realized that I had only received about 25% of the expected rebate. It also turns out that, although I had received all of the shipments before the end of July, they had not billed all of the shipments in July. They had only billed one of my six shipments in July and that was the reason for the partial rebate. When I spoke with Shawneigh, ID=24732, to inquire why they had delayed the billings until August for the shipments that I had received in July, after she expressed surprise that I had received the shipments before the end of July, she gave an explanation that they were going through a system upgrade at the end of July that caused issues and prevented them from entering the billings. (It should be noted that the five delayed billings were all entered exactly on August 1). Since I was missing 75% of the credit for the order, I was not able to cancel my membership (unapplied credits are forfeited if one cancels before the credits have been applied to one's account).
I requested that they credit my account the remaining portion of my rebate immediately since it was not my fault that their system was undergoing an? Upgrade? Which prevented them from entering my billings in a timely manner. The customer rep referred my request off to another department and indicated that they would contact me to let me know if they could expedite the rebate? The other department did not contact me.
Since more time has passed I decided to order more gift cards to make sure that I was at least breaking even with discounts vs. Annual fees. When I went to try to purchase gift cards for the popular retailers, I found message that the cards were? Currently out of stock? I checked other retailers and found that the following were all out of stock: Amazon, Target, Old Navy, Kohls, Macy's, Pier 1 Imports, Babies "R" Us, Toys "R" Us, Sharper Image, Bath & Body Works. So although I'm paying for a service, they are not delivering the service.
0 comments