What happened to Vlad’s Dell order? At first, Dell seemed to have misplaced it. Then they seemingly changed it without his permission. Now they keep robocalling him every two days to verify that he still wants his “backordered” item. Six hours spent on the phone with Dell haven’t straightened out the situation.

On Monday April 26th, I placed an order for two (2) of the “Dell Daily Deal” items listed on the http://www.dell.com website. The item was a 23″ S2309W monitor. After placing an order for two, I received an order acknowledgement email confirming my order had been placed. Then, 2 days later, I received another email stating that my credit card had been declined. I had used PayPal to pay, and I received notice from them that the payment was cleared, so I knew that was not the case. When I called Dell, I was passed around from person to person for over an hour, and told that nobody had any record of my order.

After finding a forum online where others described this problem, I decided to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau as someone there had suggested. They forwarded my complaint to Dell and a representative from Dell eventually gave me a call saying that she would look into the matter and follow up with me. Two days later, there has been no followup, but my order number with Dell has gone from being blank to being listed as “In Production” indefinitely with only one item instead of the two that I ordered AND the item now has a 1 year warranty attached to it rather than the 3 years promised in the original listing… on top of downgrading my shipping from free 3 day shipping to 7 day shipping!

It is now more than two weeks later, and the order is still “backordered”. Which means I get an automated call every 2 days from Dell, stating that my order has been delayed and I have to call them THAT DAY or it will be cancelled. I have placed more than 30 calls to Dell and spent more than 6 hours on the phone with them at this point.

If you are interested in seeing other peoples’ point of view, you can find one of the many discussion threads relating to this “issue” here.

Hey, wait….this sounds familiar. The same thing happened in March with another reader and another monitor. If contacting the BBB prompted Dell into some kind of action, maybe an EECB will prompt them to actually ship the monitor. Give it a try.

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