Buy.com is terrible with their customers. Always has been, always will be. This is just another example.

Sing it with me if if you know the tune..

Chargeback!

Another reason to add to the buy.com on the permanent banned list.

Class action! I don't understand how they think they can get away with this. Canceling the orders, maybe, as rescission due to mistake, but they don't get to unilaterally run a charge for MORE than what the customer agreed to.

It's terrible PR, either way. I will NEVER order from buy.com now. I won't order from someone if I have to worry that my card will be charged more in the future. Unbelievable.

Maybe because he didn't spend $200 in the electronics like the coupon says?

@horned_frog: It looks like that's a screenshot taken after buy.com "fixed" its mistake. See the "cancelled" in the status column and the $0.00 coupon amount? So I wouldn't be surprised if they added in the "purchase of $200" part as well.

Charge back anyone?

@horned_frog: While I generally agree with you (they should have canceled the order) I don't think they should be allowed to come down a week later and charge another $15 without authorization. Their policy does not state anything to the fact that they can later charge money if they like (even if they accidentally allowed an order that should have never gone through since he didn't follow the rules of the coupon).

They should refund the $15.00 but the people who got their order canceled (unless they did buy over $200 worth of stuff) are SOL.

It seems however that they have done this to people who *DID* follow the rules and purchased $200 worth of merchandise. At least on a few people.

Boycott!

buy.com is evil. pure and simple. This is just the latest example of why.

 
 
Oh, that's just messed up right there. I've never shopped at buy.com before, but after that move, and these replies, I'm never going to either. Damn. Just wow. Unbelievable.

I bought a somewhat expensive unlocked cell phone online this morning. I had considered buying it from Buy.com, but then I remembered all the problems you talked about on this blog and in the comments. I didn't even see this post until just now.

Thanks, everyone. Buy.com is definitely on my "when Hell freezes over" list now.

I would do a chargeback and then wait until they mail me a bill for the correct amount.

If they never send a correct bill then the item will be free.

You would think those idiots would have learned by now!

Chargeback with the reason "merchant submittd unauthorized charge to my card". They were not authorized to charge an amount beyond what was rung up at checkout.

Buy.com is going to not only have to return the money but pay a chargeback penalty on top of that -- and the number of complaints may well result in their bank revoking their account.

Yeah, this one is pretty cut and dry.

You can argue that they can cancel the original orders due to an error on their part meaning they never really agreed to the price.

But, once the item is shipped then clearly the company has agreed to sell it for the price offered at the time of the transaction.

I suspect any chargeback would be easily supported.

@Troy F.: Nice link. That case wasn't even as bad as this one, because there they just canceled orders, rather than running an extra charge after the fact: "Buy.com agreed to honor the discounted price for the 143 monitors it had in stock, but refused to ship more monitors at the lower price."

The one time I have dealt with Buy.com was by accident. It was a book I bought on Ebay that the seller used Buy.com for. I was suprised when I got a box from Buy.com for my auction. Even more suprised when on the 298th page of a 500+ page novel, I found about 18 pages of the book missing...boy was I pissed. I ended up having to go buy it at a retail bookstore cause I wanted to finish it and not wait 2 weeks for the Ebay seller to send me a new one..but I got a refund not from Buy.com but the ebay seller.

BTW does anyone else absolutley hate the Buy.com commercial with the singing cowboy? I have to mute it everytime.

Buy.com is terrible. I used to order books from them because they advertise their prices are 10% lower than amazon's. However, twice they shipped the wrong books, some books I never heard of. They finally offered to take the books back with free return shipping and ship the correct ones. A three week ordeal. I almost wonder if they do it on purpose to generate more profit by selling the wrong crappy books. Anybody else had similar experience?

I have officially boycotted Buy.com after I preordered a special edition DVD the first day that it was available to do so. Well, three or so months later, It had not shipped, nor had they charged me (thank god). Well, not to say that the spec edit dvd set is now on ebay for $99.00, when it was $29.00 originally. If I ever met the owner of buy.com, I'd give him a piece of my mind.

@Nemesis_Enforcer: Was it HP7? Apparently a lot of people were up in arms about that when a simple return to the store for a fresh copy would have sufficed...

I've started using onetime card numbers more and more because I can cancel them when I'm through with them if I didn't know the total ahead of time to properly set the credit limit.

I still won't use buy.com but for anyone who does, use onetime if you can and let them suffer through getting their bogus charges denied. If they send you a nastygram you can just ignore it -- you accepted their sale offer at price X, they took payment and sent the item, end of story.

@lalahsghost: Try Amazon's used-item system. Might get a better deal that way.

I will not purchased anything from buy.com again. A few months ago, I pre-ordered Alien Syndrome for the Nintendo Wii for $29.99 (A great deal since other places had pre-orders for $49.99). It was at first going to release in may, but was pushed back to the end of July. So in June, I was surprised that I got an e-mail saying my item has shipped.

Not only did they ship the wrong game, it was for the wrong system - "Crush" for the PSP or something like that. So I sent it back, and said this is the wrong game for the wrong system. Needless to say, they got the return, and shipped me my replacement AGAIN before the game was even released. After the 2nd time sending it back, I starting making bigger and bigger fuss about it - not that I was in a hurry since I know the game was not released yet - but I was watching the webpage for the game - and it remained the same - until I complained enough, then they starting to change the webpage. It slowly changed the page to the Crush game, and not the Alien Syndrome for Wii that I ordered. When I talked to support, I told them I wanted Alien Syndrome for the Wii, not the Crush for the PSP - and I was told, and quote "We can not change the order to something else, only cancel the order and order the new item" - Where of course I was REALLY happy because they HAD already changed the order to something else. Needless to say, after sending the same item back 3 times, they just canceled my order.

Those scum - guess they figured out they were selling a $50 game for $30, so send the wrong item 3 times so they can cancel the order in the hope of getting more $$ out of me - but it did not work. I use to purchase 5-10 things a year through them, now I don't even look at their site.

@Buran: Nah it was a Military Sci-Fi book.

If they're lucky, Buy.com will only have chargebacks to deal with. A stunt like that is the sort of thing that often attracts the attention of state attorneys general.

I'm sure there's a State Attorney General of two who will have a thing or two to say about this.

I wouldn't mind it at all if you banned buy.com from the Morning Deals section.

@Jon Parker: I'd have to agree; given how may problems buy.com has and are unwilling to fix, it doesn't seem right to publish it in the morning deals.

@Nemesis_Enforcer: I've got that commercial stuck in my head now after reading this post! But only the part where he sings "buy.com, buy.com".

Never buy anything from Buy.com. Ever. I ordered several items for a custom PC build including a hard drive, memory and Windows XP. They "forgot" to send me several items and sent me a $14 surge protector instead of Windows XP. It took several days to get anyone to respond and two and a half weeks to get the stuff I'd paid for.

Use Newegg, TigerDirect, or anybody but Buy.com.

Buy.com at it again, eh?

What do you expect from a company who has completely outsourced its CSR to India. $15 is probably what they pay them for a days work over there.

@Nemesis_Enforcer: Give!

I have had similar issues with 5% discounts,they have cancelled order when i use the coupon but then will allow the same order without it.
Let me know if anyone will file suit.

This is lame. Chargeback all the way.

This is my two online stores get 99% of my business:
Amazon.com
and
Newegg.com

Get ready to do a charge back, but remember, you MUST return the item when performing a charge back. Keeping the item after doing so is sales theft and is a felony that can get you up to 5 years in prison.

@ThyGuy:

Can't you dispute the difference though, and not the entire amount. I'm pretty sure most credit card companies let you describe in detail the nature of the dispute - e.g. overcharged, item different that ordered, etc.

I felt bad until I read the SlickDeals thread and noticed how these people were gaming the system by ordering scads of things under $15 to get them for free, presumably to flip on eBay.

The slickdeals kids posted a tote board at the top of the thread where they showed how much they received. One guy claimed 96 packages.

Here's someone posting a picture of the 21 packages he received: [forums.slickdeals.net]

If they're going to act in bad faith, I really couldn't care less if Buy.com responds similarly.

What if this unauthorized, surprise $15 charge put a person's check card into overdraft? Who is responsible for the $40 some-odd fee?

I think thats it safe to say that between selling refurbished items as new, and the coupon scam ... buy.com should not receive any consumerists business.

I've shopped at buy.com before and it went smooth as silk. But you can bet I'll never use them again. I'll gladly take my business elsewhere. This is just reproachable!!

-Former buy.com customer

Wow. This is just wildly immoral. You know some people are going to take it, too, which is the sad part. Fight them tooth and nail on this. Their mistake, they pay for it. I'd be okay with them canceling orders. It's not good customer service, but at least its not outright hostile like this is. Someone forward this to their Attorney General because Buy.com should be really taken to task for this.

I had a lot of problems getting Google Checkout's $10 discount on BUY.com purchases. I also waited for over a month for a DVD after I purchased it and then found out it's still in the "PROCESSING - FULFILLMENT" stage. WTF? A few more hiccups and haven't shopped there in months now.

If you've still got the order confirmation e-mail they sent you, you've got pretty good grounds for to dispute the charge with your credit card company.

"BTW does anyone else absolutley hate the Buy.com commercial with the singing cowboy? I have to mute it everytime."

They probably realized one of these days, Scott's gonna fall off the building.

@seanmcleary: TigerDirect? Damn, your hatred for Buy.com runs deep.

I've used buy.com probably 10 times in the last two years and have never had a single problem. I've used the google checkout coupon twice as well as some 10% off and 7% off coupons. I realize they don't have a great track record, but I've been able to save a lot of money buying through them.

Slickdeals is one of our affiliate partners. One of its website users discovered a way to defraud Buy.com by deliberately misapplying one of our $15 coupons through our checkout process. This coupon requires a minimum purchase of $200. This user posted instructions on how to defraud Buy.com and apply this coupon to any size order. These instructions violated the coupon restrictions, our terms of use and altered our checkout process. The result of this posting has caused Buy.com thousands of dollars of losses by those shoppers who knowingly took advantage of this and by some shoppers who unknowingly followed the malicious instructions. Buy.com has asked these customers who misused this coupon to either return the product or pay the correct price for their orders.

_____________________________

Jeff Wisot
Vice President, Marketing
Buy.com

@hypnotik_jello: I think you would be able to keep it given you legally bought it using a legit discount, and you can't raise prices after items are already sold and paid for. You'd be disputing the second charge, not the first one.

A malfunctioning coupon does not give buy.com the right to charge their customers a price they did not agree upon. If the coupon was invalid then canceling the orders is perfectly fine. What is not fine is simply removing the coupon and then letting the full order go through. When we submitted our orders for the discounted price we were agreeing to pay that amount and only that amount. Buy.com has shown their true commitment to their customers in this event.

What Mr. Wisot (VP Marketing Buy.com) has failed to come clean about is Buy.com never ASKED anyone to pay the correct price. They just took the extra money after the orders were completed for the discounted amount. They knew they couldn't stop all the shipments so they illegally charged people in a desperate attempt to recoup what they knew would be big losses. It's unfortunate for them, but what they did clearly appears to be illegal.