I’ve just spent part of this evening re-organising my domain name and one of my old blogs to import all of the old posts into the current blog incarnation. Whilst doing that I noticed the original post about thedigitalcamerashop.co.uk and how many comments it has received so far. It made me start thinking about what DCS say about their own customer service procedures, well according to the FAQs on the website, they should be quite a good company to deal with:

Q. When can I expect my delivery?
A. You can track the progress of your order using our on line tracking facility.

The so called tracking system is the basic of the basic, no based on my story which you can read about here, this is my tracking status to this day:

25/02/08: Received @ 16:01
26/02/08: Status = Part Dispatched
22/07/08: Status = Dispatched

Yeah – great!

We aim to deliver all orders as soon as possible. Orders received before 13.00 Monday to Friday for items that we hold in stock will generally be dispatched from our premises the same day. Orders received after 13.00 for items that we hold in stock will generally be dispatched the next working day (excluding weekends).

‘Generally’, what that seem to mean is, if we have it in stock (unlikely?) then they will ship it out asap, or if the supplier has it in then again, it will be shipped pretty damn quick, however, god forbid you order something from the website which they don’t stock and neither does the supplier – you either won’t see it, or it will take a looooong time. They don’t run a live stock system which makes me think that they don’t actually stock items themselves otherwise, how hard could a stock system be from them?

Should an item be out of stock or a special order we will obtain it as soon as possible. We will inform you via e mail if an item is out of stock and give you the opportunity to cancel your order.

No they won’t, I received nothing more than a small note on the bottom of the delivery item for the part delivery I received. Easily missed but I definitely didn’t receive an email. If my order hadn’t been part shipped and both items were out of stock then I wouldn’t have received any correspondence by the looks of things.

We normally dispatch items using a 48 hour parcel delivery service.

See above.

Despite our best efforts to deliver as soon as possible, unforseen circumstances could lead to a delay in delivery of goods. Any dates / times specified are approximate and should not be taken as guaranteed.

So, basically they don’t really have an idea of when you might get your items, they also won’t keep you upto date, leaving you the ‘customer’ to chase them.

One of the other things that is annoying with the way DCS does business, they take your money immediately whether they will be delivering your goods the next day or the next month – not a bad way to earn a little interest, no matter how small that might be.

One of the directors has recently setup another business which seems to as of yet, be currently in testing and not live however based on the past performance I would be wary about doing business with http://www.camera-box.com/.

Obviously all of this information is my opinion and is based on either my experience of DCS or from information obtained through a credit check.

Enjoy.

Would I recommend them now, not in the slightest, their staff are rude and abrupt on the phone when I called up to see about what they could do for me on another – more expensive lense price wise. So onto my experience.

I’d been looking around for a new lense for my Canon 350d, originally I had decided on a EF70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM but after reading review after review, most people seemed to be suggesting that the 70-200mm f4l would be a better buy, especially if coupled up with a teleconvertor. So I changed my focus onto one of these lenses, more expensive but obviously it’s an investment more than a cost decision.Looking around for the best price and somewhere that had it in stock led me to www.warehouseexpress.com, I had a look at their ‘bargain basement’ page and came across the lense people were recommending but with the nice addition of IS – Canon’s Image Stability system which would allow a few stops lower. They had it on the site priced at £414, bargain I’m sure those who know, would agree. I loaded up my cart over the course of a day, trying best to assure myself that this was a good choice and checking around to confirm pricing. I left things until a day later before deciding to go for it so again I loaded up the virtual shopping cart with the lense, a Slik 700DX tripod and a Manfrotto monopod and finished off the order process.

For the next hour and half, I kept checking back to my email expecting a order notification – I never did. Instead what arrived was the following

“Many thanks for your recent order with ourselves.

I regret to inform you that we are now sold out of the-Canon Ef70-200mm F4.0 L Is USM and unfortunately this item was the lastone. I’ve cancelled the order, and no payment has been taken from yourcredit card.

Please let me apologise for any problems this may cause.

For alternative items please visit our website or call our sales team on

01603 486413.”

Short sweet, doesn’t seem to really make sense in saying they’ve sold out and this one is the last one???!!! Anyway, I called them up to see if they could offer something similar to what I had ordered for a reasonable price. The lady who answered the phone was in the least bit helpful, all she could do was read a list of lenses from the website which were similar in specs to what I had asked for – I’m capable of doing that myself. I told her they weren’t really what I was after based on the price of my original order and specification so I ended the call. After looking around for other suppliers I decided that I would just plump for the non-is version as I had originally intended.

Ebay and a lot of other stores were all selling this lense for quite a lot less than could be bought from warehouseexpress.com so I thought I would give them another call to see if they could do anything on the price. I got through to a chap this time who mentioned they price matched with certain companies and asked me where I had seen the price. I also mentioned about my cancelled order and then as soon as I mentioned it was from Amazon, he said we don’t price match with them so I asked about another company to which he just point blank said ‘NO’, ok nice customer service skills here. I once again mentioned how I’d not long ago had my other order cancelled due to a fault on their part and could he look at offering me the lense at a slightly reduced cost, the answer again was quite categorically ‘NO’. At this point I’d had enough of speaking to them so ended the call and went and sourced the lense from another company – well done warehouseexpress.com, you lost out on a £500 order all because you seem to want to quote the classic Little Britain T.V show: “Computer says no”. Got the lense from another company for cheaper, also ordered the tripod and monopod from elsewhere for again, cheaper.

So folks, my advice, avoid warehouseexpress.com.

We settled on a place called Bella Italia (a chain) which served quite nice food but nothing that I would write (blog) home about! After saying hello to a few other people from the Ripe meeting who turned up in the restaurant, we headed over to the Slug and Lettuce for a couple of drinks before leaving for our hotel room.

The nice thing I found about Southampton was the Parks located just on the very edge of the shopping area, we walked through these on the way for food and the way back to the hotel and it was nice and peacefull, no idiots around and I managed to snap off a few pictures of some of the local buildings and statues – I’ll upload these when I get back and if they are good enough quality!

Anyway, long and short of this post is – don’t visit Southampton if you want something to do for a few days – it doesn’t seem to offer it.

Been messing around with it for a week near enough now just learning how to shoot in manual mode to get the best out of my pics and this is the type of thing I’ve got so far:

Hopefully gonna head out to a midget race http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midget_car_racing on sunday for one of the chaps that works for us and take some snaps…..