iPhone order, Carphone Warehouse and Leakage

I became angered once again with having Pay as you go and as I’d been wanting an iPhone for some time, I decided it was about time to switch back to a contract phone and try and get hold of one.

That seemed to be more difficult than I would have thought but after a few weeks of being out of stock, Carphone Warehouse had them back on their website and available for order.

Fantastic.

So I went though the relatively simple checkout process (not even using an affiliate link!) and saw that I could pick up my order from the store, rather than waiting for it to be delivered.. this I thought would be easier so I selected this option, pinged in my nearest store details and continued the order.   Confirmation was received on my email that they had got my order OK and would begin processing it… by this time it was towards the end of the day so I was hoping that I’d be able to pick it up either today (Wednesday) or Thursday.

Then this morning I received an email saying that my ordered had been canceled due to a security check failure!  If it was a credit check failure I could understand (I’m crap with money!) but the security warning was off.  It gave a phone number and said to call up if I wished to proceed but the original order had been canceled.

A little bit of googling and then a call to Carphone Warehouse then revealed that the reason for this is that with some handsets (the iphone being one of them) the could not allow store collection and it had to be delivered to my home address instead.  That’s fine and the phone is coming tomorrow, but there are a few things that this raises:

1) As the order had been canceled, if I had gone though an affiliate link one could only assume that this would also mean that the affiliates commission is canceled

2) It’s just poor customer service – they should either not allow store pickup on these handsets in the first place, or better still call / email me to tell me there is a problem with this method and put the order on hold, not cancel it completely!

I’d be interested to know how many other people would go down this route and how many would not phone up to replace the order, one would think a group as large as CPW would have a better way of doing this!

Looking forward to joining the iPhone club – just a shame I’m at work tomorrow and hopefully it’s delivered when my wife is in the house!