Buying carpet online - What could go wrong?

One thing i'm often asked is whether or not its of benefit to purchase your carpets or flooring online, its an interesting topic for debate. Sure, you only have to google carpets, flooring or whatever it is you are looking for and you'll find an endless list of companies selling these items – but at what price? Now, we've all been in that irritating situation waiting for a courier or one of those large delivery companies to turn up and yet for some reason or another, much to your annoyance, they don't turn up. Last June, over 9% of UK courier deliveries failed, of the nearly 1 in 10 failed deliveries, how many people had taken time off of work to wait in for a delivery? You can be sure its a lot of people, consider the following example-:

Mrs Bloggs (made up name) has bought her nice new carpet on carpetsavingsforyou.com (again, a made up name!!!), she has found a lovely plain Grey carpet for her bedroom, stairs and landing, she found it in her local retailer at £11.99m2 but after a lot of searching on the web she has found this company selling it at only £9.99m2, bargain she thinks – so she clicks buy it now, only to then find that the price quoted was not inclusive of vat or delivery, she's then informed (via email) that the carpet will arrive the following Tuesday between the hours of 8am and 12pm, so she texts her boss who ok's the time off and she uses up a days holiday in the process. Tuesday comes, tick tock, tick tock, so does 12PM..........still no delivery. Mrs Bloggs starts to get a little anxious, so she calls the courier, only to be told that she will have to contact the supplier of the goods, carpetsavingsforyou.com, as they are the supplier and that the contract is between them and the courier, so Mrs Bloggs emails carpetsavingforyou.com ( being an online only service they do not have a contact telephone number, faceless as we often call it). She is then told that they will contact the courier for an update and email her a response 'as soon as they have any further information'. 3:00pm arrives and Mrs Bloggs, by now fuming and wishing she had just bought the carpet from the retailer, receives an email informing her that due to a delay the courier cannot give an estimated time for delivery but they assure her that 'it will be delivered by the end of the working day'. Eventually at 6:05PM there is a knock at the door and standing there is the delivery man with Mrs Bloggs carpet, at last Mrs Bloggs waiting is over and it brings to an end an extremely stressful experience.

Of course, this doesn't always happen, but its a fine example of what can go wrong when we are awaiting goods to be delivered via an online retailer and also the costs involved in doing so, what at first seemed to be a saving of less than £50 for Mrs Bloggs resulted in a lost day of annual leave and a considerable amount of stress.