Thursday, May 28, 2009

Short Rant About Getting Ripped Off

I buy and sell products online everyday. I've ordered from huge companies like Amazon and Dell and little guys running eBay stores. I have never been more disappointed in a company than I am with USA Wallpaper.
I ordered a country valance (made by Park Designs) back in March. The USA Wallpaper customer service department notified me that the item was discontinued and out of stock, but they drafted my PayPal account anyway. The customer service agent told me that she was not authorized to issue a refund, but that she would send the refund request to the accounting department and they would process the refund during following month (April).
It's now May and still no refund! I have contacted them again and the customer service department is unable to explain why the refund has not been issued. She again promised to send the refund request to their accounting and told me I was welcome to call back in a couple weeks to follow-up on it. According to the customer service agent I spoke to, there is no way that I can talk to directly to accounting to get the problem taken care of promptly. After three phone calls and numerous emails to the merchant, they have still not issued a refund for the merchandise that was never shipped. Poor, poor, poor service. I will never do business with them again. Thankfully they only stole a few dollars. If this had been a major purchase, I don’t know what I would do.

I trying to resolve my problem, I started searching online to see if anyone had come up with a good method of retrieving money from these deadbeat curtain merchants. To my dismay, I found dozens of similar complaints from customers across the USA. Some of the complaint sites are:
www.retailmenot.com/view/usawallpaper.com
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/456/RipOff0456208.htm
http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=55603
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/456/RipOff0456238.htm

I tried to resolve the problem by going through PayPal at first, but they declined to participate. I filed a BBB claim mid-May, but nothing has come of it yet. BBB has the company rated as an F for whetever that's worth.

Beyond the main company name, the USA Wallpaper folks seem to have a network of different company names running various online stores. The ones I know of are:
USA Wallpaper
Decorate With Style
CountryDecorz.com

1 comment:

Unknown said...

File a consumer complaint with the Ohio Attorney General office. I just filed one and spoke to somebody there who will be helping me in getting my money back. It seems that the Ohio AG is now investigating them since they have gotten considerable number of complaints, and the more complaints they get the sooner that they will shut down these scums.