buying online | If By Yes

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After my little rant about my frustrations with chapters.ca, I got an email from a social media person offering help with the gift card thing. Pleased, I gave her the number on the gift card, as well as the fact that PH had had it checked at the local Coles and the card was functioning and reading a full balance.

She sent that information to some other bloke who emailed me and said he had manually transferred the money onto my account online. I emailed him back thanking him and asked him why the card wasn’t reading.

Turns out it’s because only SOME of the numbers on the card were relevant.

For anyone else having this problem, you should ignore any numbers preceding the digits 604883 in the barcode. Any preceding numbers are irrelevant (they tell Chapters where someone bought the gift card, which apparently their website is not set up to do).

Good to know.

I have suggested that they leave instructions to this effect on their website, because the chance of someone intuiting that “604883” is the place to start in a string of 30-odd digits is virtually nil.

Anyway, there’s a happy ending – once I had the online balance transferred for me, I only had to try and place the order three more times for it to actually go through (the first time was my fault – I forgot a coupon code and had to go back. The second time, when I had reviewed the order, and clicked “place order” it returned me to the beginning of the checkout process again. Third time was the charm).

Four of the five books should be winging their way here via Canada Post. The fifth is a used book and will take a little longer to ship.

Hurray!

Dear Chapters,

Your website is glitchy and badly set up, but I appreciate that your customer service is on the ball enough to find and respond to my complaints. I appreciate that. If they hadn’t done that, I likely would have given up and ordered the books from Amazon.Although I have to say, I hope your online process becomes much smoother in the future.

Carol

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bad customer service, books, buying online, chapters, coles, gift cards, indigo

Let’s backtrack a few days.

It is the morning after my birthday. I have received 90 dollars in Chapters/Indigo/Coles gift cards between now and Christmas but I have not spent them yet because I know from experience that it is a mistake to buy myself ANYTHING between Christmas and my birthday. Whatever book I buy will invariably be the book that Perfect Husband bought for me as a surprise.

Perfect Husband wakes me up with “Happy Birthday! None of your gifts have arrived yet!”

I don’t mind that, but it means that I still can’t buy myself any books either. So Perfect Husband tells me which books he has ordered for me, so that I won’t go and buy them myself. It’s a good thing he did because otherwise I would have ordered those exact ones. So now I dance off to browse online for the other books I want.

Giddy as a kid in a candy store, I line up an impressive booklist online. Then, reflecting, I check the availability of some of my books in local book stores and then remove those from the online order. After all, the book store is an endangered species and I try to patronize them whenever possible. So I just order the books that you never see anywhere – a book on Baby Led Weaning, a book by the author of The Scientist In The Crib, a book about babies by Desmond Morris, and a book about secure attachments.

I try to order the books.

Chapters.ca tells me that I should log in so they can give me my irewards discount. Agreeing wholeheartedly, I attempt to do so, but my usual passwords aren’t working. Surprised that I have never created an online account at Chapters.ca before, I try to start a new account.

The email address you have given is already associated with an existing membership. If you have become a member using this email address, please call 1-800 blah blah blah to recieve your activation.

So… in other words I can’t create a new account OR log in to an existing account because I am an irewards member? I dial the number.

Thank you for calling Chapters Indigo online services. We are open Mon-Fri blah blah blah.

It’s Saturday.

So now I can’t buy the books because I can’t create an account or log into an existing one, because I paid them money to become an irewards member. I can’t get customer service for this issue, because it is the weekend.

So I wait.

In the meantime, I decide to go to the local store so I can buy The No-Cry Sleep Solution. They have two copies in store, according to Chapters.ca.

After half an hour of browsing the Parenting section, I come to the conclusion that there are no copies of The No-Cry Sleep Solution. Since the books appear to have been alphabetized by a blind chimpanzee, I wonder if I could somehow be missing the elusive books. The shopgirl that I hunt down assures me that they do have two copies in store. Her computer says so.

She can’t find The No-Cry Sleep Solution either.

“Sorry,” she says, “sometimes people, like, leave them on other shelves in the store?”

Perfect Husband leaves the aisle with an armful of Jenny McCarthy books, (of which there are plenty) because he has decided that they should be moved to other shelves in the store.

We leave Chapters without The No-Cry Sleep Solution.

Now it’s Monday!

I call Chapters and ask them if I can please be allowed to create an account so that I can patronize their website.

They send me my activation email. I go to check-out my books and I enter my gift card number and the corresponding PIN.