Barnes & Noble.com

Full review
I have been a regular with B&N for more than 10 years. My primary reasons to shop with them was fast free shipping and decent Customer Service. Unlike their competitors (e.g., Amazon), their free shipping was faster (B&N usually used UPS 3-day expedited delivery for me), and they usually could ship the item within 24 hours (on items marked as such). Their customer service was also quite responsive, if needed.

Let me be frank; in my opinion they were always a little bit more pricey than their competitors (even with B&N 10% membership discount, for which you have to pay $25 annually; therefore, the membership is only worth if you buy more than $250 worth of goods from them). Their selection was quite decent but still not as impressive as of Amazon's. But these disadvantages were overshadowed by the advantages mentioned before (fast shipping and customer service). And you could always walk into their brick-and-mortar stores, just for the experience of it.

Unfortunately, recently (Fall of 2008), things started to go worse at B&N (in my opinion). Items marked as "usually ships within 24 hours" rarely shipped within this time period. (Right now, I have an open order that is already 2 weeks past that time frame.) Customer service seems not to care, not to read your e-mails, and provide inaccurate/misleading information. For example, on one of my orders, the second ship date (after they failed to ship within the original date; i.e., within 24 hours) was December 10. When it did not ship on that day, I contacted by e-mail the customer service on the next day (December 11) asking what the new estimated date would be. Their response claimed that the original shipping date (December 10) was still valid, and the item would be shipped on December 10. (They did not explain how they were planning to ship the items one day to the past ...) Attempts to call the customer service were similarly useless. They usually told me to call after 24 hours, if the order does not ship, without providing any additional information.

The interesting part is that B&N claims in their e-mails that you can cancel the portion of the order that is late. However, their system does not allow you to do so. To be more exact, it will initially allow to do this, but later will notify by e-mail that orders in the shipping phase cannot be cancelled. (This also applies to the orders that will take weeks to ship.)