Sears online shopping experience, fraudulent

Sorry folks this article is not about technology but it’s a personal rant about my online shopping experience with sears. It was one of my worst shopping experience and iam so disappointed by sears online shopping. I would never recommend anyone shopping online with sears. I don’t think sears understand what online shopping customer satisfaction is. In fact after dealing with them for the past three days I kind of felt that they don’t really care for their customers. Seriously sears should take lessons from Amazon or any other online vendor who value their customers. So this labor day I was looking for a good canon DSLR to fulfill my photography passion and bumped into the following link.The price of this canon( Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR Camera with Canon EF 24-105mm IS lens) was way too low and an awesome deal. Initially I was a little skeptical. So I called up sears customer service, and the lady assured me that the vendor is authentic and that sears does a lot of background check before they allow anyone to sell their product on sears website. So fine. I believed her, went ahead and ordered this camera. Though she assured me about the vendor and all that, what I didn’t realize was that she had no clue about the third party vendor. She did not even do a basic vendor check. Why? Because the contact number for seller was invalid and the company was using Gmail account. Something fishy.

So just out of curiosity I sent a mail to the vendors(The electronics limited) contact email id (mitch.petipren@gmail.com) asking him about the details of the camera and the response I got was-

The Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR is brand new and also comes with Canon EF 24-105mm IS lens, we have packaged the item already for shipment but unfortunately we were unable to proceed your specified payment method because our merchant is down. So we advise you proceed to make payment through Western union money transfer and send money to the information below.

Name: Latanyia Bennett
City: Baton Rouge
State: Louisiana
Country: USA
Zip code: 70802

Immediately after the transfer is made kindly get back to me with the following details.
Sender full name :
MTCN number
Amount sent :
Country :

We shall proceed to send out your order and get back to you with the tracking number.

Mitch

The above mail scared the shit out of me and got me thinking. I started getting a bad feeling. Googled for more info on the deal and found some other folks also going through the same shit on slickdeals forum .This is when it dawned on me that the whole thing was a SCAM!. In addition, all the folks who bought the camera got a order shipment confirmation with the same bogus tracking number for UPS(ZA7894988597890).

After I got to know it’s a SCAM. I called up sears customer service rep and the first person I talked to said iam being impatient and need to wait for couple of more days to get the camera delivered. What a bummer. So I called up again, and this time I asked for the supervisor. I explained the details to supervisor and she agreed that it seems fishy. Finally someone understood. After all this, the problem did not get resolved. All I heard is that “we will get back to you after our investigation” and nothing happened for another 24 hours. So I called up the sears customer service today and they asked me to talk to my credit card company. That’s about it.

Also what’s disgusting about this whole fiasco is that even after they knew that vendor is a fraud, the link to the product is still live on sears website, and you can purchase the camera by checking out. So as we speak there are folks who may get fooled by this offer. In fact while writing this article, I was chatting with a sears online rep and she had no clue that the product she was trying to sell me again was a SCAM.

It was such a bad experience for me. I will never ever buy anything from sears and would not recommend anyone either. In short, I feel like cheated by sears and not by “The electronics limited”. I purchased the camera based on sears customer service promise and sears brand. (BTW, sears rep who sold the camera to me would not reply to my mails even after repeated attempt.) For all the shit I went through, I would have been happy if sears had accepted that it was there fault and provided some alternatives to all customers. Alas! That never happened. Sears management should take responsibility to have let a fraud use their website to cheat customers like me.