Stephen Ellwood

If they cant deliver they are not useful

I ordered some paving stones from them. The delivery time was slow but there is 500kg so I accepted this. Their initial communication was good but then I was passed onto Transmission who were chosen by Gadero to deliver. Transmission are a useless company and did not deliver; their track and trace was about as much use as a chocolate teapot and the upshot is that on Friday before I want to lay the stones, they are not here. Gadero should review their choice of courier as if their deliver company is bad then Gadero is bad. Having a good selection of products at good prices that they can't deliver is not very helpful. I would be better off with Gamma who at least can deliver.

Update: It is now 27th May, 11 days after my review and I have at last received my paving stones though one (out of 16) is broken. It is still usable since I have to cut some of them but not the quality I expected. Lesson learned, I will not order from them again.

Did not deliver, claimed they were not able to deliver.

The item was due to be delivered yesterday. According to the track and trace it arrived the other side of Brussels at 10am but then nothing happened. I checked at 11pm last night and no delivery was scheduled. I checked again this morning and the delivery had been scheduled between 0700 and 0900 this morning. That clearly didn't happen. We did not hear the bell. Now I check and it said that they failed to deliver. Why not? I was in the whole day, did not leave the house! Clearly they were lying. Gadero chose them so Gadero is at fault for choosing such a useless delivery company. That's where my next review is heading. Hopefully Gadero will stop using this company and it will die a natural death as all sick things should.

This morning I received an OKI C844 printer. The paperwork that came with it was terrible but i managed to google search for OKI drivers and tried to install them.

I tried to configure a static IP address. It asked me for the password and suggested that is should be 123456. This did not work. It DID NOT SAY that the password is on a label at the back of the printer, otherwise I would have typed that in. I found an errata sheet just now that told me this. I surfed the internet and found a reference to the default password being 000000. This did appear to work on the printer but it did not work in the driver. I tried to change the password on the printer and did change it to a 6 digit number. This still did not work for the driver software. I then went back into the admin panel and reset the password, believing it to go back to 000000. It did not.

I can confirm that the admin password is NOT:
1. 000000
2. 123456
3. aaaaaa
4. The same as the very long password on the back of the machine.

I am now locked out of my printer. My gut feeling at this point was to send the printer back as faulty, which it is. I do not want a password on my printer, it is not what I ordered and I have already wasted about €400 of my time.

Instead I tried to get it fixed under warranty. I surfed to the URL in the guarantee literature only to find that the page does not exist. I eventually tried to register on the OKI Europe site and it told me the serial number PRINTED ON THE BACK OF THE PRINTER was invalid.

The bot on the support site is useless and the real person who took over was similarly useless, only telling me what I already knew.

So now I am sending it back and will continue to use my 12 year old Xerox printer instead.

I did not buy the product as it is $4000. I did click on the unsubscribe button to stop receiving spam. I did reply to an email to say I was not interested and please stop sending me SPAM. I still get spam. I would like to say I am losing sleep from the SPAM deluge but that would be going to far. Suffice to say if they cannot act within EU law then I am not interested in their product.

They say the mark of a good company is how it deals with things that go wrong. On this basis Europcar is a TERRIBLE company.

My wife hired a car in the UK and it almost immediately came up with a severe oil warning. Its one of those terrible VW cars where the cam belt runs in the oil and at 50,000 miles (exactly the mileage on this car) it needs to be replaced. Being owned by VW you would think that they would have done preventative maintenance on it but no. A car company that does not rent you a reliable car is as much use as, well you can fill in the blanks!

After an hour the AA came out, quickly saw the problem and said that the car could not be fixed at the roadside. My wife called Europecar and asked for a replacement. She was asked to travel in the AA van to the closest garage over an hour away despite the AA man saying that this garage would be closed by the time they got there. At one point she was told that if she had taken the extra breakdown cover she would have had a car delivered but since she did not she would have to loose half a day of her life because they rented her a poorly maintained car. Eventually, after one hour of very diplomatic discussion on my wife's part the car was taken away and another car should (might?) be delivered tomorrow.

I am told I should be constructive so here is my advice. Do buy reliable cars to rent to your customers. Do keep them serviced including preventative maintenance for know issues. Do not offer them additional breakdown assistance to cover for your negligence, that would be an insult. Do not treat your customers like criminals and blame them when the problem is all of your own making, suck it up and sort it out. That way you stand a chance of getting their business again and I will not try to warn people away from using you. And to anyone reading this, please do look at Trustpilot - anyone with this many 1 star reviews is probably worth avoiding. Advise my wife should probably have taken.

I received a call last week from this company to ask for an appointment to come to talk to me about Solar panels. I am interested in solar panels so I agreed. Preben Collaerts arrived yesterday and presented me with distorted figures for example using 80cents per kWh for electricity when I pay only 64 cents. It of course showed a very attractive payback period. He told me that if I signed up immediately I could take advantage of the current Premie conditions which go down in 2023. He claimed to have had a cancellation so could start installation 2 days later. This was the first alarm bell and I should have reacted. However, though the price looked high I was assured that the quality of the solar panels was the best so I signed the form on Preben's tablet. For the avoidance of doubt I WAS NOT SHOWN THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS BEFORE I SIGNED! Preben very cleverly sent 2 emails 1 minute apart, the first with the terms and conditions, the second with the signed offer as if I had managed to translate and read their document in 1 minute.

Afterwards however I investigated the company on trust-pilot and found that the name Green Choice has very bad reviews on Trust Pilot so I looked more closely. The price they are charging is not at all completive and I quickly found I could source most of the components at least 20% cheaper myself.

The Terms and Conditions were not explained to me during the consultation but were attached with a copy of the signed contract sent via email. If I had read them before signing I would not have signed. For instance they sold me "High Quality German" solar panels at 50% extra price compared to Chinese ones but in the contract they are free to exchange them for cheaper ones. The paper I signed is worth nothing to me as they can just change what they want. I replied to Preben Collaerts email 2 hours after his visit to say that I was not happy and wanted to cancel the contract. It is my right to a cooling off period in European Law.

Just now I received a phone call to arrange for the installation to start tomorrow. I told the woman on the phone that I had cancelled the contract. She told me that I cannot cancel the contract without penalty. This is illegal under EU law due to the cooling off period. The contract itself states that the contact is only valid after the deposit is paid and I of course paid no deposit.

This company is trying to take advantage of people with the promise of getting in before the Premie goes down but in reality you are actually paying more than you are saving.

I should have followed my own advice and only used companies that are recommended to me by people I know. You do not know me but I strongly recommend you DO NOT use them.

This is not a Belgian Company. The products do not come from Belgium. They are not delivered in the promised delivery time. They clearly use bots to write positive reviews for TrustPilot, just read the real ones. Better to use AliExpress. At least they do not pretend to be a local company and they are cheaper. Luckily bought through PayPal so I can get my money back if it is not delivered to my satisfaction.

Yet another front for a Chinese company. Advertise 2 day delivery, then you find its coming from China. Shame on you Google for supporting their lies. I now wait, just as I did with Grandad and other pretend NL companies.

We opened a current account when we got a mortgage with Crelan. Their rate was lower than ING at that time. later interest rates went down and we wanted to renegotiate since it would save us 17,000 Euros in interest, more than enough to justify moving back to ING. They agreed to the lower rate but then they did not honor that agreement. We did not find out until 5 years later, by which time we had paid 8000 in extra interest. They said that it was our fault but we did everything they asked? We found the money to pay off the mortgage and are moving our bank account.

I wrote a 4 star review for Bol in 2021 and have been a loyal customer ever since, spending several thousand Euros with them. More recently they have been terrible and now I feel I must downgrade them to 1 star. This year most of the things I have ordered have been late but their system just assumes that they were delivered. Case in point was my order this week. They said order before 23:00 and get it next day. That was Monday and it is now Thursday. I go on Holiday tomorrow so want to cancel the order but cannot because they say it is shipped. Bpost website meanwhile say they never received it. Now it may arrive while I am on Holiday and get stolen and I have to work hard to reclaim my money for the second time this year. I am done. Never ordering from them again!!!

It seems I am not the only one to be cheated by this company. I ordered some coving from them. The delivery date on their website was December 7th. It is now December 17th. I received no notification of delay. I emailed them and they blamed the supplier. 1 week later I tried again and and they again blamed the supplier. I asked for my money back and the goods miraculously arrived the same day, except they did not send them as promised. These are dirty tricks to avoid giving the money back. They clearly don't carry stock and their website simply lies about the delivery date. I have opened a complaint with Paypal and have asked them to pursue.

The one good thing is that Roshni, their customer services person always replied. They get an extra star for that.

All across the site it says "order before 11pm and receive the order the next day". This is what they claim is their USP. However it is simply not true. I am now on day 5 of waiting for my order. I complained only to find that they claim it says somewhere that delivery will be within 10 working days. Strange how I never saw that repeated over and over? If you want fast delivery don't go to this company. If you want the best prices don't go to this company. If you want the best customer service definitely don't go to this company. There are companies who genuinely do next day delivery, stick with those.

Update:It is now 2 weeks since I made the order. Following my first complaint they shipped 3 out of the 4 items I requested and they arrived last week and are in active use! This is good but they should have done immediately without me needing to complain. They have also just called me to say that the final item is now in stock and will be shipped today.

I understand now that one item was not in stock when I made the order; these things can happen. However this should have been made very obvious so that I could have removed it from the order and bought it somewhere else if the need was urgent. Silently breaking a promise is no way to win customers. I ordered the rest of the tools I needed from another supplier last night and already have them in my hand; this is the kind of service I need. I will not retract my first paragraph as I believe it is important to show how Fixami made me feel as a customer. In a world full of alternatives only the best customer service is good enough.

I have been using Coolblue now for several years and make several orders per year from them. On the whole the service has been great, in fact one of the best companies I have bought from.

Earlier this year ago I bought an Iphone from them but then saw there was a special offer from another store so I wanted to send it back under their return policy. They were very happy to take it back with no questions asked.

I also bought a touch screen PC from them. After a year the touch screen failed and they replaced it under warranty, again no questions asked, though I did loose the data on the PC and had to set it up again because they did not transfer the settings from the old machine to the new machine.

Most recently I bought a Huawei Mate 20 pro from them. The website advertised that I would get a free watch and wireless charger if I ordered the phone. They did not say that I had to apply separately to Huawei for these free gifts. This was a bit upsetting to me as I would not have chosen this phone if there was any doubt whether I would get my free gifts. My wife has now bought the same phone from Proximus, and also gets a free watch. it is also 200 Euros cheaper than from Coolblue.

This brings me to my final comment. When I first started using Coolblue their prices were very competitive and their delivery is always next day so it was always my go to shop. These days they are normally not the cheapest by quite a lot so I use them less than I used to. They would get 2x more business from me if their prices were competitive or did a price promise.

15 business days have now elapsed and I have only received one of the three items I ordered. The track and trace facility I paid for does not work. It claims that the item has been delivered but there are in fact three items in the order and the other two cannot be found using the tracking number given. I was careful to place the order using Paypal so I can get their help to get my money back.

I consider this website to be purposefully misleading customers by claiming to have things in stock when they clearly are not. The prices are over twice what Aliexpress is charging for the same product with similar delivery time. I should have checked this website before I ordered.

Of course I have contacted the customer service. I will post the outcome (good or bad) here also.

I can now report that all of the goods I ordered eventually arrived. There was no need to pursue the PayPal dispute I opened. The strip light ballast I ordered seems better than the original and the other 2 items were as expected. I have therefore upgraded them to 2 stars.