Madam Lil's Emporium

So, I 'won' a pair of CAT boots from this shop in the UK, Coventry to be precise. They got shipped to me on the 22nd of February. On Tuesday, I got an email from the company to say that the parcel had been returned to me because no-one had been there to accept the parcel and it hadn't been picked up at the post office and if I gave them another 15 quid they'd resend them. Well, there was no fucking way that the postal service had improved so that a parcel could get to me from the UK, spend 2 weeks sitting at a post office, and then get back to the UK in precisely 14 days. Not when 14 of those days should have been spent in the post office waiting for me! So, I got the tracking number and looked the parcel up on the Canada Post website. It had made it as far as customs in Mississauga before being returned due to 'incomplete address'. So, I emailed the company back and explained this. They told me that I'd given them no other address than *blah* (my complete perfect postal address that works for everyone else!), so I said that as long as they'd written everything down including postcode then it was perfect, but was their complete address on the back (complete, as in postcode, because it obviously got back to them). They asked me if I was going to pay for reshipping or if I wanted a refund of the auction price. I told them that as the shoes had been returned to them through no fault of my own, they might as well refund me and that they might want to look into this for future customers because penalising people for events outwith their control was hardly good business practice.

I am annoyed. There was obviously something missing from the address on the parcel, I would guess postcode as Canada Post will not deliver anything without this. Why can't they just admit this? Why would they expect me to pay over $60 for double shipping when I didn't fuck up? And, when it was returned for reasons stating 'incomplete address', why would I then want to pay for something to be reshipped when it would likely be returned again - the problem can't be fixed if we don't know what it is, can it?!

So, boys and girls, if you are ever on eBay don't buy anything from a seller called "boss-shoes". ("theshoeplanet", however, were fantastic - buy from them!)

[cross-posted to my multitude of blogs]