The Tale of Two Orders

Sony is an international technology conglomerate; therefore, doing business with Sony means one has to deal with its frustrating customer service department as one does with all other mega-corporations.

I ordered my Sony VAIO FW490, plus two accessories and extended service plan as part of the campus bundle discount program, on SonyStyle.com in early August. Everything went through smoothly; the sales agent even offered me free upgrade to express shipping. I received the two accessories two days later and I was rather pleased with the order, so far. For the following week, I would anxiously check the order status 5 times a day until I finally got tired of seeing the word "Processing".

Then one night, I received an email from Sony stating that my laptop order is canceled! Canceled?!? I immediately called customer service and a guy with thick Indian accent informed me that they have trouble charging my credit card. I assured him that I have sufficient funds on my card and that all my other online purchases went through just fine, but he insisted that I contact my credit card company to next morning. So I did, thinking that I would be receiving my laptop soon after I sorted out this little misunderstanding. When I contacted Sony again the next day, after confirming with the credit card company that my account was fine, I was shocked to find out that I could not simply reopen the laptop order. My original order is gone, removed from the system as if it has never existed. Now, I have to place a new order for the laptop.

In order to receive the campus bundle discount, one must order the laptop, the accessories and the service plan at the same time. Since I have already received the two accessories, I wasn't going to order two more. To make the long story short, I had to spend over 4 hours talking to three customer service agents and two sales agent over the phone to sort this mess out. And those Indian customer service representatives are not helpful at all. No matter what I said to them, they would simply recite the same scripted answer. Luckily I convinced an American sales agent to do a tele-conference with the customer service agent and myself; at one point, even the sales agent was getting frustrated by the lame response from the Indian customer service guy.

In the end, they agreed to let me place a new laptop order at the campus bundle discounted price, but I would have to pay the full retail price first and wait for a refund later. In addition, I would have to wait an extra week before they could ship the laptop.

If you read the return and cancellation policy on SonyStyle.com, you would appreciate the insanity of this incidence.

Sony Style is unable to cancel most orders after it is placed. Please see the following to better understand what situation applies to your order.

In-Stock Items: Sony Style endeavors to ship our customer’s orders as quickly as possible. This means that we do not ‘hold’ an order for an In-Stock product for 24-hours as is the practice of some online shopping sites. For In-Stock products, it is not possible to modify or cancel an order once an order has been placed*.

*Please note that engraved products are considered In-Stock items and therefore cannot be cancelled.

Apparently, a customer cannot cancel an order once it has been placed, but it is perfectly okay for Sony to cancel an order hastily without even attempting to resolve any problem with the customer. What is the point of requiring customers to provide phone numbers and emails if you are not going to use it? So many sales agents have put in so much effort to close a deal, shouldn't the company work with the customer to complete the order instead of canceling it for no good reason?

Ordering online should be a quick and simple experience; why would Sony turn it into hours of phone call and two complicated orders/refunds.