Pixmania.co.uk (Since November 2010)

First of all, I must say that I am writing this review only because after a transaction with Pixmania UK I have received an automatic email from the Customer Service director who expressly asked me to leave a comment about my experience with Pixmania on Ciao, to "improve the quality of the services we provide". My review concerns my experience of shopping with them rather than simply using the website. If you're ONLY looking for a review assessing the design of the website, you DON'T need to read further.

So, prices may be slightly cheaper than average, and in fact products are actually shipped from other European countries, hence the higher than average delivery costs. This is not however really clear anywhere on the website. My monitor should have come from Belgium. But the most important point is that customers have very little protection when shopping with Pixmania.co.uk. My experience:

I still haven't received a monitor I ordered two weeks ago and while they are "investigating" with Bpost, their partner (it's taking more than two weeks and no end in sight) I have received no updates and no refund. They seem to use a lot of distraction techniques to take time. For instance, the first time I emailed them to ask them where my order was, they replied asking to "clarify my request". Then, a few emails after, once things were clear enough, they emailed to say that they could not launch an enquiry because I needed to provide them with "additional paperwork". "Paperwork?" I surprisedly asked. They should have all the data in their system, it's online shopping. It turned out what they wanted in fact was me to type and email the same information to a different Pixmania email address.

I really wish I had payed ten pounds more and got the monitor from another seller. The easiest thing now would be to cancel the order, get a refund and buy the monitor somewhere else. This is the basics BUT NOT AN OPTION WITH PIXMANIA. So I'm locked by their slow and ineffective bureaucracy. They can't even afford to call me back, they sent me an email to ask me to call them. Think twice before shopping with them.