Debenhams Review

Overall Rating

There are Debenhams around the country.
Easy for guests to buy gifts in store, online or by phone.
Gifts can be as expensive or cheap as you choose.
£50 Gift Card for registering.

Bad communication.
Items missing from deliveries.
Guests being refunded gifts without confirmation of why.
Unprofessional service.

My husband and I registered with Debenhams for all the good points I have listed. The other gift registries we had seen were either providing gifts of a too low quality or a too high quality, and we wanted something in between.

We went into store and stood around in the Wedding List section for about 5 minutes whilst the assistants had a chat to each other, though we made it obvious we wanted to speak to them. We registered our list and were made aware that we could compile the list 3 months prior to the wedding. Fine. We needed to wait for the cards to put in our invites because they were out of stock and being printed. A few months past and still no cards, so we kept popping into Debenhams to see where they were. No rush because we'd been organised, we had plenty of time before we had to send the invitations through.

It got to the point where we had to send the invites and still no cards, so we went into the store and were begrudgingly given a frugal number of cards to use.
3 months to the day we went into the store to compile our list. The first thing we were asked was if we had registered, which we confirmed. We were then told we couldn't compile our list until 3 months prior to the wedding - we confirmed that it was. The assistant seemed a little put out by our organisation. Plus we had booked our spot to do this anyway. The assistant was very helpful in teaching us how to use the computer, etc. to make the list. Brilliant. We got our £50 gift card and everything was peachy.

About 4 days after we made the list, we had a phone call to tell us that we could go and compile our gift list and when we told them we had done this, they responded with, "oh, yes of course you have, thank you". Reassuring.

After the wedding we had our first delivery. Debenhams had actually called to tell us that they had to bring the date forward a day because their driver was ill. Fair enough - our delivery came in the back of a Ford Escort carried by two women. Didn't like that the tags on our wrapped gifts were written in 16 year old's bubble handwriting with kisses after every name (not always appropriate from every guest). There was an item on our picking sheet which wasn't in the delivery. We went into store to sort out, and also to enquire as to why one of our items had been refunded to a guest and never delivered. This was never explained. We ended up buying the item in the shop and the guest paid us back - it had increased in price. We wondered if this was Debenham's plan. The undelivered item was going to be checked at the warehouse.

A week later we hadn't had any response as to what was happening so I emailed the customer service dept. via their website. They contacted the branch who called us and we went into the store. Seems our item had been mislaid, but the assistant told us that one had been delivered into the store, and put out on the shelf about 2 weeks prior (same time as our delivery) even though the item as Debenhams Direct (strange?). We were allowed to take the item home with us, as thankfully no one had bought it.

We are still waiting for some items to be found from the warehouse and delivered (we married 2 months ago). Who knows what other problems we'll encounter.