Gear Zone www.gear-zone.co.uk Review

Click here if this is your business
★★☆☆☆
1.6
31.0% of users recommend this
  • Customer Service

  • Quality of website

  • Value For Money

Click here if this is your business

Competitive Dad's review of Gear Zone www.gear-zone.co.uk

“I ordered a jacket from GearZone because they were 20%...”

☆☆☆☆☆

written by Competitive Dad on 07/09/2006

Good Points
The item I was buying was 20% off in their Summer Sale.

Bad Points
Quality of Customer Service was awful.

General Comments
I ordered a jacket from GearZone because they were 20% cheaper as the item I wanted was end of season. Having ordered the jacket and got order confirmation, I awaited delivery. However, I got an email two days after my order, saying that although the item I wanted was in stock there was a problem with my debit card details.



I had elected to pay by Switch and from a great deal of experience know that you need either a Start Date OR an Issue Number, not both. The problem GearZone was experiencing was being unable to process my debit card transaction because I hadn't provided a Start Date. I couldn't provide it because I didn't have it. Furthermore, I have bought stuff both just before and since, online with the same card.



After a couple of emails expressing my dismay, I finally decided to cancel my order. They said they would happily accept another credit card but quite frankly if they are unable to process a transaction with a standard debit card, I was loathe to give them even more numbers to play around with.



Bottom line, I've gone elsewhere and bought the jacket at full price with a company that I know and have had good dealings with in the past. Rather that than have to deal with the people at GearZone who cannot process even a simple debit card transaction.



(I've selected Still waiting on the Delivery because you've got to select something, but I'm not waiting obviously!)

  • Jacket, £120

    Goods purchased & cost

  • Still waiting

    Delivery

  • Quality of website

If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.

Gearzone's Response to Competitive Dad's Review

Written on: 02/06/2009

Hi all,<br/><br/>I would just like to take this opportunity to offer my sincerest apologies for the issues you had with Gear-Zone in 2007-2008.<br/><br/>We have since changed ownership and the team responsible for the site during those days in long gone. We are now back on top form, just like the halcyon days of 2002-2005, with the same ranges and price that everyone liked, but with extra special emphasis on Par Excellence customer service.<br/><br/>We're answering the phones 7 days a week!<br/><br/>Pre-charging for orders has been canned, we will only charge for items once they're ready to leave us.<br/><br/>I know that once lost trust is hard to regain, but I would like to offer people to try our service now and see what a difference we've made to the experience.<br/><br/>Once again, we'd like to apologise for our previous incarnation, but we're a new and improved beast now!<br/><br/>Gear-Zone (June 2009)

Reply to this comment
If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.

Gearzone's Response to Competitive Dad's Review

Written on: 18/06/2009

Hello Flyguy,<br/><br/>Thank you for your comment regarding the issue you've been having. It was not my intention to start a forum on the bottom of the original poster's review, I was merely trying to clear up that Gear-Zone is now under new ownership and that our customer service (which yes, appears to have been awful during 2006-2007) is sorted.<br/><br/>I am aware that our site has its own set of technological idiosyncracies; it is a 9 year old platform that we're improving a little at a time to try and ensure as little disruption as possible for everyone. (It is taking time, as these things tend to do, which if you've every used web developers, I'm sure you can empathise with!)<br/><br/>However, seeing as you mentioned it, I completely agree with you, they are irksome indeed. We periodically have times when our database 'locks' up and causes failures when attempting to access certain areas of the site like products or finalising transactions, why even this morning I have been working to fix the same issue. We would like to put a message on the site when this happens but it's normally fixed before we get a chance, and once the DB is locked the message doesn't want to appear on the pages it's useful on anyway.<br/><br/>These 'locks' prevent me from being able to work on the database as well, so I understand exactly where you are coming from.<br/><br/>In our defence I can only say that they are relatively rare, we normally fix them normally well within the hour that they are noticed (unfortunately I don't fancy working 24 hours to keep an eye on it so when I'm away from work or a computer it may take longer) and we're still ironing out a couple of bugs on our recent database 'upgrade' which was meant to fix this error. <br/><br/>I really am very sorry for any inconvenience it causes when you are unable to browse the catalogue, however it should be a rare occurrence, which we are trying to fix! <br/><br/>Of course if you are trying to browse and get issues we do have obvious contact details on the site now and the phones are answered quickly when we're here 09:00 - 17:30 Mon-Sat, 10:30-16:30 Sundays, so please feel free to call if you have issues in future and at least we can show you that our customer services is now back on par, which was my reason for replying to the original review.<br/><br/>Also, the site is coded to display fine in anything other than Netscape 4.0 or I.E. 6 or lower, so to Competitive Dad, I do apologise, you should not get the error messages if you update your I.E. Obviously I'm guessing if you're still using such an early version of I.E. you probably like it, so I'll try and fix the coding that isn't compatible with that version, but it may take some time. I'm sorry.

Reply to this comment
If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.

Flyguy's Response to Competitive Dad's Review

Written on: 18/06/2009

transaction faliures are really irksome indeed!

Reply to this comment
If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.

Gearzone's Response to Competitive Dad's Review

Written on: 18/06/2009

Hello,<br/><br/>I have to confess that I did not actually say it was a 'new' site. I said that the site was under new ownership and special attention was being paid to the areas that people seemed to have found issue with back in 2006 - 2007; namely customer service.<br/><br/>The site is still, apart from a couple of modifications still the same as it was in terms of templates etc, our website itself was never really the problem, just the communications, problems with stock and pre-charging. All of which should now be up to and exceeding visitor expectations.<br/><br/>I do not know what Java Script error you are getting, suffice to say that I use I.E. (8), Chrome, Firefox and Safari to test the site and receive no error on any pages related to Java, I also test the site from home on a regular basis, as do others within the company, and no JS error has ever been mentioned. So I'm slightly in the dark as to how I can fix it.<br/><br/>Occassionally when we update the catalogue pages a script error appears, but that normally releases after 5 minutes.<br/><br/>My apologies for not being able to help more with the Script error.

Reply to this comment
If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.

Competitive Dad's Response to Competitive Dad's Review

Written on: 17/06/2009

Hmm I've just checked out the "new" site and get a very basic JavaScript error on EVERY page which is quite annoying.<br/>I don't have JS problems on any other site and am just using a vanilla install of IE6.

Reply to this comment
If you are commenting on behalf of the company that has been reviewed, please consider upgrading to Official Business Response for higher impact replies.
Was this review helpful? 0 0