In recent days, we’ve received numerous complaints from people who attempted to use Best Buy gift cards to make purchases on the store’s website, only to end up frustrated and trapped in BB’s byzantine customer service maze.

Here’s one such complaint from Michael, who attempted to place an order at BestBuy.com using a gift card. Instead of receiving a confirmation screen, he was kicked back to the payment information screen where his order had not been credited with the gift card money, even though his card now showed a zero balance:

Called Best Buy’s customer service department and was told it was a known issue and to wait 30 minutes for my funds to be refunded back to my card automatically. After an hour they were still not there so I called back to open a claim as instructed. Alas the gift card department was now closed.

Out of curiosity, Michael looked at the customer service forums on BestBuy.com and found similar complaints like this one and this one and this one.

When reached by Consumerist for comment, a company rep replied:

We had a few issues with online gift card redemption earlier in the week but we believe these issues are resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience people may have had as they were tried to redeem their gift cards for some exciting new technology. It was an unexpected glitch and we know it was frustrating for some customers.

We’d like to know if more of you have experienced or are continuing to experience this problem.

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