Several friends, family members and colleagues have told me of the torrid times they have had dealing with Apple Europe. By and large, my own dealings have been unremarkable—until now.
On 14th Sept I placed a web order for a new PowerBook via Apple Education. The email acknowledgement arrived promptly, and a confirmation email three hours later. I took that to mean that the order had been accepted and was being processed.
Yesterday, i.e. one week after placing the order, I received another email, saying:
Thank you for placing an order on the Apple Store.<BR>
<BR>
Unfortunately, we are unable to obtain an authorisation for this order with the credit/debit
card you have provided.<BR>
<BR>
It is often a simple administrative step taken by the bank or the credit card company
when the cardholder is not present to sign for a transaction. This could be due to the
following reasons:<BR>
<BR>
1. Your credit card company may have placed a credit limit on your account. Please
contact your credit card company to notify them of your order with Apple Computer.
The issuing bank's customer service phone number can be found on the back of
your credit card.<BR>
<BR>
2. If you are using a debit card, please contact your bank regarding your daily spending limit.
If your order total is more than the bank's daily limit, you may want to consider another payment
option.<BR>
<BR>
Once your bank/credit card company are aware of your order, please call the Apple Store
on 0800 039 10 10 and press option 1, an Apple Store sales representative will help you
process your order. You will need to quote your web order number W75667521.<BR>
<BR>
Thank you for placing your order with the Apple Store, we value your business and look forward
to hearing from you.<BR><BR>
Kind regards,<BR>
(Yes, note the extraordinary use of <BR> tags!)
Well, I didn't mind this. In fact I was quite pleased as this was an unusual transaction and I appreciated the bank (and Apple) being cautious.
So I called my bank and confirmed there was no problem. Interestingly they at first said they had no record of an attempt by Apple to draw the funds. I called Apple but missed their 'close' time of 6pm by one minute. A recorded message invited me to 'call again tomorrow', or send an email to an address they provided. I did the latter and asked them to try again to draw the funds.
This afternoon I noted that my email had been rejected by Apple. "Email support is not available at this time." No apologies. So I called them on the phone and was dumbfounded to learn that my order had been cancelled (by their finance department), because my credit card had not been cleared.
This is manifestly wrong, not to mention insulting. I have some questions for Apple:
- Why wait a week after accepting my order before telling me there was a 'problem' with my credit card?
- Why notify me by email yet not accept a response by email? (Why, indeed, is a premier technology company like Apple having problems handling email??)
- Why bother asking me to contact my bank if you have cancelled the order anyway?
- Why did the email not say that the order had been cancelled?
[Postscript: I have just received a very helpful call from Customer Service. It seems that business practice at AE is based on US models. :-( My suggestion that cancelling the order was unnecessary and inconsistent with the content of their email was well received and will apparently be passed on. I have placed a fresh order and we will see what happens.
To be fair, Customer Service has been very helpful: they didn't cancel the order, but I'd sure as hell like to meet up with the idiot who did.
