Victoria's Secret
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Frustrating, time consuming, broken website, and lousy customer service.
A review by alexaeditorial written on Jul 17, 2009
Full review
Awful customer service.
I ordered hundreds of dollars of merchandise over a period of six months and called CS only three times.
The first was to make an exchange for a different size in a bra that didn't fit: the ever-so-helpful guy who handled it tried to convince me that it would be a great idea for me to just keep both bras; you know, the new one and the one that DIDN'T FIT.
The second time was to ask if I could exchange a top for a different one for the same price with the 25% discount with which I bought the original. I was told yes. When they sent me the exchange, they charged me the new item's current price, sans discount.
The only time out of all my orders that I purchased items on backorder, they overcharged me when they sent the items. As in, they plainly charged a higher price than what the order confirmation email showed would be charged for these items.
When I emailed them they sent back inane replies that made it clear they were only skimming my emails, if even that, and after two emails they completely stopped replying.
So I had to call CS a third time.
I spent 45 minutes on the phone with two different agents, both equally unhelpful to the point that I'd swear they're all specially trained to provide the exact opposite of service to their customers.
The first one randomly transferred me to the VS credit card handlers without asking me or even letting me know about it, and despite the fact that I paid for the order with a different card, which she should have known since supposedly she was looking at the order record.
The second agent finally managed to get what I was saying after literally 20 minutes of refusing to understand what I meant by "this is not the price I agreed to pay when I made the purchase and I have clear proof in the order confirmation email you sent me".
The items in question were bought with a discount and I used a giftcard to pay for part of the price; the discount was not taken off the price when they finally shipped the order.
The agent kept claiming that since I used a giftcard, resulting in my credit card being charged less than the total price of the order, their charges must be correct and I should have no complaints.
She conveniently did not have a record of my original order. The only things she had a record of were how much they'd already charged me and the current price of the items I ordered, both of which details she repeated to me ad nauseam no matter what I said, the same as did the first agent and the email replies they did deign to send me.
She said that the order confirmation email I received at the time must have had a misprint. Of course.
Apparently, whenever you buy anything on backorder they just charge you whatever the price is when they finally ship it and not, like any sensible merchant, the price you actually agreed on when you made the purchase, as shown in the order records.
I guess this is too much trouble for them, since they do not keep order records.
I luckily remembered that I used a discount code and figured out that this must be the reason for the price difference. This was a month after I placed the order, so I don't think most other people would even be able to remember that much.
When I told the agent about using a discount, she, get this, asked me what the online discount code was exactly. An entire month after I used it.
When I finally got her to admit that they owe me a refund, she offered to send me a giftcard instead, for all of $2 more than the refund I was due, so I could go to their stores and spend yet more money. That was a NO.
There was no apology or any offer to compensate me for all the time and effort I spent on this because of their incompetence. Any other retailer would have offered a gift, a discount or at least a $10 giftcard.
Their website is terrible: 4 times out of 5 nothing I placed in the shopping cart was actually there when I tried to check out, and every single time I tried to sign in to my account I would get a 'temporarily unavailable for routine maintenance' page that it would take hours to get around. This has been happening for months and they're not doing anything to fix it.
Most of the merchandise has a very limited range, especially in the stores. All their models look like sticks, but just try to find a bra you actually want to buy in a size 32; and anything below 32 simply does not exist for them - even in the Pink collection, which is supposedly for teenagers.
A pair of size 0 pants was several inches too large on me, even though I'm not as thin as the model in the picture, whom the pants somehow fit perfectly.
Watch your money and check all charges against the order records, or better yet save yourself enormous amounts of frustration and wasted time and shop somewhere else. Not even their sales are worth this hassle.