We moved house two weeks ago. Money is very tight and we had to spend £3,500 on moving costs and buying a fridge, washing machine, dryer and microwave. We've been living off cold food and what we can do with the microwave. We couldn't afford to get a cooker as well until yesterday.
I phoned John Lewis at 8 pm and ordered a cooker for delivery and installation next Tuesday and paid by credit card (about £460). I got a confirmation email an hour or so later but at 11 pm got another email saying that the order had been cancelled - no further explanation. I phoned John Lewis again and it seems that the order had been cancelled as the delivery slot booked (and confirmed when I ordered) wasn't in fact available. It took 30 minutes and some pressure by me to sort all this out and get the order rebooked for next Tuesday - at first they were saying delivery wouldn't be until a week after that.
This morning I had a new cancellation email from John Lewis saying that my second order had been cancelled because my order had failed a security check applied to all online orders to authenticate the information and the details provided.
I phoned John Lewis again and apparently my credit card was fine (i.e. not an issue with my bank) but they have additional anti-fraud security checks. They said that they couldn't say why I had failed those anti-fraud security checks but suggested it is because I didn't give a landline number (still waiting for BT to provide us with a line!) and I hadn't a history of ordering with them. I said that I thought that this was ridiculous as:
- I was paying by credit card, there was no issue with the credit card, and the address to which the credit card is registered is the same address to which the goods were delivered.
- Just over a week ago I had ordered some net curtains from John Lewis to be delivered to the same address and paid for with the same card and those net curtains were delivered and signed for on Friday of last week.
- I was ordering a cooker for installation - hardly the sort of item that is at the top of the list of purchases by credit card fraudsters.
This security check was never mentioned to me when I placed the orders and I have never encountered this with any other retailer.
Eventually I spoke with the John Lewis customer service manager who refused to apologise and said that they could reorder but the date for delivery and installation would now be 4 December or later, that there was no guarantee that the new order would not fail the security check and that they would had to look for authorisation for another £460 from my credit card.
The problem for us is that for the two orders that we already placed, John Lewis requested authorisation from my credit card issuer so £920 of my credit card limit is unusable until such time as the authorisations expire (which my bank says will take about 48 hours). We will have to wait until Saturday to order elsewhere and of course even longer to have the item delivered.
Meanwhile we remain without a cooker and have a six month old that we would like to start weaning.
Am I being unreasonable to think that John Lewis are behaving very badly here?
