Circuit City

Full review
I went to Circuit City Online the first time hoping to place an order online and pick it up later in the store. The advertisement was for an order turnaround of less than half an hour. This sounded great. I soon discovered that the online store and the retail store might as well be considering two different entities. The only thing you can order online and pick up at the store is a small fraction of the items and all seem to be high dollar items, such as televisions and such. No music, software, games or videos are available for pickup. That was the first disappointment.

My second disappointment was when I discovered that when I did a search for a particular movie, I could have the site seperate movies from music. This made for tedious shopping. Try typing in something like "yoga" or "knight" and see if you want to spend the time sorting out what of the 25 pages of results is actually a movie and which is music. I didn't.

The descriptions of the movies lacked or were nonexistant. It was nice to see the publishing company, but plot would have been most helpful.

On top of this, about 90% of what comes up in a search is backordered with no indication of possible delivery. Now, at Christmas I can understand this. This is February. While I guess backordering is better than not having, it was really disappointing to have nearly every item I got excited about be backordered when I went to order it.

My next complaint came when I discovered that most of the search results did not display the price of the item. That was annoying to say the least. In addition, most were more than the in store prices.

The prices were mediocre compared to other online order sites.

But, they did have a few movies I wanted. So, I tried ordering them. All the little clickings went smoothly. They earned back one brownie point.

Shipping was near immediate and they shipped the method I requested. One more brownie point.

Then came a problem with the order. The movie wasn't the one I thought it was. I called to cancel it. My call was routed to the Phillipines as apparently all of their customer service calls are (when you dial their 800 number for customer service and don't choose to order something on the phone).

The person I talked to was a wonderful, kind person. The problem was the big language barrier and a horrible connection that I could barely hear through. They tried really hard. It took about 40 minutes to try to get through the call. I was promised a confirming email. Bless, the person's heart, I'm sure they tried to send it. But, it never came.

You can't return things to circuitcity.com without return authorization, so I had to call in. My call was routed to the Phillipines once more.

Again with the same language barrier and connection problems. Another 30 minute call. This time I got my return authorization and email though.

Compared to Best Buy, these guys lack severely. I hope they make some serious improvements to their shopping experience.