I placed an order on thehut.com on Friday at 5.15pm and realised later that I had ordered the wrong item (I followed a link from Google Shopping which only matched some of my search term, i.e. I searched 'game name pc' but the result only said game name and not the system). As it was saying dispatch would be on the Monday and that my order was still being processed, I attempted to cancel the order about 6.50 on the Account Order page using the cancel button. Came back an hour later to see the cancel button had reappeared and my order had not been cancelled. Tried again, but this time the status had changed to "Awaiting Despatch" (it had NOT been on my first try) and I was unable to cancel.
On Saturday I rang customer service twice to attempt to cancel the order. First person I spoke to said she didn't see why I shouldn't be able to cancel it as it wasn't due to be shipped until Monday and she would contact IT to cancel the order. When I didn't receive an email confirming the cancellation I rang back and spoke to someone else who said he would raise a ticket with IT to cancel it. (Not sure why IT would cancel orders, surely the warehouse or shipping dept should be better?)
Then got an email at 5.05pm this evening telling me that my order had been shipped! I rang up Customer Services (AGAIN-- and it's an 0844 number) to see what was going on and was told that once an order is in the warehouse they are unable to and/or it is extremely rare to be able to cancel (not what was I told by the previous two people, by the way). I asked where the items are kept and was told in the warehouse (??? 
). They require a return authorisation number in order to return anything, so I asked for this rather than wasting any more time/money ringing again later. The cs rep told me that this number only lasts for a couple of days so anything I get now may not be valid by the time the order arrives/I send it back and that Royal Mail will refuse to accept any packages from me without this number (which I fail to see how RM will refuse to accept and deliver a package from/for me as I am paying, but he insisted it's not the company's policy, RM will just return it to me without thehut.com knowing about it 
)
I don't understand why it was apparently "awaiting despatch" on Friday evening when there was no intention of ever posting it until Monday and why the hell I couldn't cancel this order when I tried 1.5 hours after placing it (this length of time is reasonable to me!).