Wednesday 24 November 2010

Lanvin-less

So I'm back from Edinburgh and London is dull and soooo cold and I have a horrible red eye (due to a weird condition I have that flares up about every 6 months or so AND on top of all this, I am Lanvin-less.  Apparently people started queuing at around 8am the previous evening for store access, so I thought I'd outsmart them, set my alarm super early and do it from my bed.  The collection was available to buy from 7am so I was up at 6.30, fingers hovering over the keyboard in anticipation.  The two specific pieces I was after were these...

Do I have them? No! The collection went live at 0701, I managed to get both the dress and the skirt in the size I wanted. Amazing! Then I clicked through to the checkout, debit card all laid out in front of me, ready to type in the magic digits and have the two pieces I had lusted after for so long delivered to my door. 
Except that after clicking 'Pay by Debt/ Credit Card', the page remained the same but with 'Error Unknown' in the bottom corner. I literally tried to pay by every other means necessary and then (in a separate page) hunted for the online Customer Services number which (of course) didn't open until 8. I kept trying until 8 am then continued to try while I was in the massive queue to speak to someone at customer services.

At 0835 ( I had now been up for 2 hours trying to do this!) I managed to speak to a friendly Scottish lady who assured me that all was not lost.  Apparently the site had crashed due to huge demand (doh! Why don't they make provision for this??) BUT as I had my items out of my basket and was at the second stage of checkout (paying) I would be fine.  I should keep the page open and keep trying in about an hour when things had calmed down.  I asked (in an increasingly manic tone) whether she was 100% positive that the items would not vanish/ the site would time out etc and was repeatedly assured that this would not happen.


I followed her instructions to the absolute letter and checked the site again in an hour.  I did not refresh the page, I simply clicked, 'Pay by Debt/ Credit Card' as I had been instructed. What happened, the page VANISHED and this appeared in its place.


Oh yes..and my basket was now empty. Not even a sorry. Just a smug little note.  By this time I had been trying to buy a dress and a skirt for over three hours, straining my already bad eye over a website that had no compassion.  I had followed the instructions issued by H&M Customer Services who had either lied to keep customers happy or didn't know what they were doing. I decided to give up and start my little saving fund for some actual Lanvin one day, it'll probably make me happier in the long run.  (The Boy already has a beautiful scarf that is one of the highlights of his wardrobe..it accidentally wanders into mine sometimes..)

By the way if any of you, my beautiful readers managed to obtain so Lanvin at H&M, please let me know how you did it!xxx


P.S. Good explanation/ rant here of how the situation should have been handled.



Just to be clear, I'm not mad with this chap. I still love him. H&M on the other hand...

3 comments:

  1. The exact same thing happened to me!! I got my basket to the checkout and got the error message :-(

    I plan to spend my hard-saved lanvin money on something else special this weekend to cheer myself up! you should totally do the same dear xxx

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  2. I am so sorry you are Lanvin-less. Maybe they were not worth it ...

    Thanks for visiting my blog and for the sweet comment.

    xoxo,

    Rali

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  3. i'm sorry to hear you didn't score the two pieces you were anxiously waiting for! sounds like you had a frustrating experience. H&M obviously wasn't prepared for the traffic.

    http://style-haus.blogspot.com/

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