John Lewis didn’t deliver - but say they did. What now?

[JohnLoulou]

In the lead up to Christmas we received an astonishing number of parcels from John Lewis, as all our family members elected to have their presents delivered directly to us.

Recently a family member checked that we’d received everything, as DD had only acknowledged two out the three items in her thank you letter.

We had never received this item (which I’d have remembered, as DD would have been over the moon with it).

Family member queried this non-delivery with John Lewis, and they responded by sending us a photo of our front door and the bottom half of a woman (me) taking delivery of a John Lewis parcel which they said was this item.

As I said, we received LOTS of John Lewis parcels in the run up to Christmas. As far as I’m concerned, this photo could be of any one of them.

Having taken delivery of some parcels costing £££, I’m hardly likely to lie about the non-arrival of one costing a tenner. John Lewis haven’t refunded the item because they say they have proof of delivery. Actually they just have proof of a delivery, and haven’t supplied proof of its contents.

I haven’t got too exercised over it, because it was a tenner’s worth of present.

But now I need to buy various very expensive items including a new laptop, and I don’t want to buy from John Lewis in case it doesn’t turn up, but they send me a photo as “proof” that it has.

Has this situation arisen for anyone else? How did you resolve it?

We had this about 2 years ago, we bought a child's car seat from them and it never arrived, we'd had it sent to a click and collect shop but it never turned up. Their customer is awful, they basically kept saying "just wait for it" which we did wait a further week or so but we needed the seat 😂 we kept emailing and their attitude was well we sent it.they were awful, we complained in the end snd they finally accepted a refund to us and sent us a free coffee voucher to use in heir cafe 😂
I've had smaller items from them since but I'm not sure I'd trust them with a big product like a lap top as they tried their hardest to not refund us the car seat x

And yes, I could buy from Amazon or Curry’s, but I’d rather not. It’s John Lewis - it’s supposed to be a model of retail integrity.

Thanks @sarahc336. How annoying. I would love to ask why they think a child’s car seat would be your favoured choice of fraud.

I do use Amazon, and over the years things have gone missing. They never quibbled - just refunded straight away. Once an expensive design book that had got lost arrived months after I’d received its replacement, and when I emailed, they told me to keep both copies.

I don’t understand why John Lewis would piss off their customers like this - particularly as they must have a record of our deliveries over the years.

We order a lot from John Lewis. The family member should have an email with a tracking number, and two emails if the items were dispatched separately. All JL needs to do is look up the photo associated with that tracking number. Are you absolutely sure it's not mislaid somewhere in your house, accidentally in the back of a cupboard or packed away with the Christmas decorations etc.?

Why would they pick a random picture from your address as evidence?

It’s definitely not in our house - before packing away Christmas we went through everything, having read Dogger’s Christmas .

I can see the theory behind the dispatch emails, @AdventureIsWaiting, but actually the transaction still requires trust on both sides and I’m not sure how you track that. We’re My John Lewis customers and this sort of thing has never happened before but surely you’d think they’d analyse our records and decide on the balance of probabilities that we’re not likely to be telling fibs?

Or would they rather risk losing £2k of potential sales for a present costing a tenner?

Same thing happened to me and they were most unhelpful. You can claim through your credit card if you paid with one as you haven’t received the goods.

We’ve definitely lost trust because of this. It’s their word against mine and that’s fine, but it means I need to go elsewhere to shop.

Which is also fine, except I’d like John Lewis employees/partners to keep their jobs, which they won’t if customers go to Amazon because a faceless American corporation which treats its employees really badly nonetheless does customer service really well.

I think you need to accept that John Lewis are not the retailer that they once were and take your business elsewhere. If everyone keeps shopping with them because they used to have great customer service then nothing is going to change.

If you have a local Waitrose you can get the parcel delivered there and also if you do that if there's a problem or you don't want it they can deal with the return too.

Present was a tenner so not worth the time or energy of our family member complaining to the credit card company. I think that protection only applies for items over £100 in any case.

In the future does that mean I can’t buy anything cheap from John Lewis? We get so many household goods and school uniform from there.

@Sprig1 I think you’re right, but how sad.

JL should be able to tell you what was in that box, using the tracking number.

I wonder if 2 items were meant to be/in the box and it wasn't packed correctly or you didn't realise it was there and threw it away.

It was a large-ish box so wouldn’t have been thrown away accidentally, @pinkandstripey.

It’s still only John Lewis’s word against mine that they packed the parcel correctly with all the items.

Although it’s not this parcel that’s upsetting me - it’s the loss of trust in a company I’ve shopped at literally all my life. I don’t want to shop there going forward because of this tiny breakdown of trust, but I’m not sure how you make internet shopping work without any trust in the customer.

Then I'd put it in writing to them as a complaint - exactly what you've said here. Although legally, their contract was made with the person who purchased the item, so not sure what legal rights you have as the recipient of a gift.

I'm not defending JL, we've had some dreadful customer service from them over the years! Their electronics guarantee is worth absolutely nothing.

JL customer service is non-existent these days. I'm now having to take legal action against them after multiple problems with a bespoke item. They admitted fault within hours of the item being fitted, they (eventually) remade but with further - yet somehow different - faults which were again admitted by them, yet I am 2 years into a battle for a full refund - they have offered a token amount, leaving me ££££ out of pocket. Absolutely appalling service - I'd expect from cheaper retailers etc but I chose JL and the increased cost this meant purely because I trusted them. Never again - and I spent ££££ every year with them. No wonder they are struggling, if they'd refunded me I'd have spent far more than their costs in the time since (as would my family). And it's so annoying as I bought so much there.

@junenotoffred What an absolute nightmare! We were thinking of looking at JL for a new kitchen and some flooring at some point but definitely not now - so many things that can go wrong in that scenario and I’d want someone intent on putting them right.

@pinkandstripey I’m not going to follow up this parcel and neither is my family member. Really, who can be arsed over a tenner? I was just musing about how long John Lewis has left if this is their model of internet shopping. I’m not traipsing into Waitrose every time I buy something as it negates all the convenience of online shopping, even when we’re not shielding in the middle of the pandemic.

But where the hell am I going to shop for anything expensive and stressful to buy now ?

If you’re in the market for a laptop, try ao.com. Their customer service is good, their delivery times are too and they have a good range of stuff.

@Foxyloxy1plus1 Thank you! Really helpful. I have used AO before for white goods and been really happy, but had absolutely no idea they sold laptops.

The amount of time you’ve spent typing this thread out could have been spent typing a complaint. I don’t think their customer service is what it used to be, but if they had a good deal on a laptop I wanted then I wouldn’t cut off my nose to spite my face.

Love it, @CausingChaos2, you’re absolutely right. Maybe I’ll send them this thread.

What are the internet policies of retailers other than Amazon and John Lewis, does anyone know?

If, for example, you ordered 10 things from Next and only 9 arrived, how have they treated the situation? How about Net a Porter, who sell astonishingly expensive stuff?

(Realise this thread makes me sound like Harry Wallop fishing for an article, I’m definitely not, actually just a SAHM).

I placed a large order with George/Asda last month, it came through in drips and drabs which I put down to it being sale items.
To be fair I had loads of emails keeping me up to date of what what coming in each parcel and tracking info which I was happy with. Then 5 items never arrived.
I gave it a week, emailed querying the situ as tracking said they’d been delivered(!) and, amazingly, it was all sorted in less than a hour after my original email to them. They offered to resend everything that was still in stock and refund anything oos, refund the whole lot or do a mix of the above. As I wasn’t too bothered about some extra sheets by that point but wanted a particular duvet set I asked just for that and a refund on the rest.
I’ve been ordering clothes from them for years and tbh I’m relieved they didn’t mess me about as I’ve always thought they were pretty decent.

@JohnLoulou

We’ve definitely lost trust because of this. It’s their word against mine and that’s fine, but it means I need to go elsewhere to shop.

Which is also fine, except I’d like John Lewis employees/partners to keep their jobs, which they won’t if customers go to Amazon because a faceless American corporation which treats its employees really badly nonetheless does customer service really well.

To be fair, I think it sometimes depends on who you get in "customer service". Remember Beast from the East. Well according to Amazon their courier delivered a Surface worth £2k during that, through drifts of nearly 6 feet of snow in rural Scotland, without leaving a mark in the snow and all under the watchful eye of my CCTV! I argued with them for a week over that because they said it was delivered despite this being a literal impossibility (it took us three days to get out with 4x4's!) and CCTV footage as evidence he was never where he said he was when he said he was. As a result I have only recently started ordering anything other than Kindle books. (And one of my staff whose husband works for Amazon says that they are a lot better than many of his previous employers, so I guess integrity is in the eye of the beholder!)

Last week the Sainsburys delivery driver quite literally threw the crate of food at me nearly knocking a clearly disabled person with two sticks over. When I complained about him I was told, in writing, that customer service was "at their discretion"!

And don't even get me started on Royal Mail deliveries...

My point being that I don't think there's a foolproof way of getting good customer service - all of them are in it for the money, and how well you are treated can be hit and miss.

I’ve had this before OP - ASOS parcel arrived, there were supposed to be 7 items in the bag and there were only 6. I contacted them and they sent me the missing item straight away despite it being as you say a case of my word against theirs - I could’ve been lying and I could have had the item but like you say, why risk losing a customer over a t-shirt that probably cost about £8?

Can also report that Mcdonald’s are very understanding when you go back up to the till and say ‘excuse me, you didn’t put my fries in the bag’