Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Bad Rapha

After the worst e-commerce experience that I have ever had, I'm calling a fatwa on Rapha Racing Ltd, the English purveyors of upmarket cycle kit.

Rapha guarantees that they will ship standard delivery orders with 48 hours and a maximum ten day shipping time. They also claim 'Rapha makes buying online a risk free and painless process, wherever you are' which must be intentionally ironic.

I placed an order with them on 6/12, for a Fixed. track top and a couple of pairs of Grand Tour gloves, for which they speedily debited my credit card. As of today, according to the 'order history' on their website the order is still 'awaiting shipping'.

In the last fortnight I have sent seven emails to Rapha inquiring whether the order has, in fact, shipped, and if not when it will do so.
I received a reply to the third, wherein one Laura Etherington wrote "Apologies for not replying earlier. I’m looking into this and will be in touch shortly."
Since then, not a word.

I would like to think that this is down to some glitch in Rapha's email system, however they have not responded to three voicemail messages either.

UPDATE: go here for the more or less happy ending.

2 comments:

Rob said...

Sic your credit card company dogs on thum...

David Benson said...

Well, that would probably be the grown-up way to deal with this,but for the moment I'm going to wait and see whether this progresses from its current #50 spot on the Google search for Rapha Racing Ltd...