June 02, 2010, at 12:05 PM

I Don't Like buyspares.co.uk

I bought a grain mill (no, really) from http://www.buyspares.co.uk/ and when it turned up, it was scratched up on the outside and full of flour. In other words, it had been used. Yet they were selling it as new. Maybe they had misfiled (or insufficiently checked) a previously-returned item?

I phoned them up and they tried to convince me it was dust from the warehouse (that had got into the inner workings, though a sealed box), then offered me a refund. (Well, the distance selling regulations didn't give them much choice.) Free courier collection sounds good until you realise you have to wait in for the handy collection timeslot of 9am - 5pm... Rather than send me a replacement, I just got to order it again. This has the disadvantage of me paying twice, but the advantage that I get the replacement before the return.

Except when it turned up, it was even dirtier than the first (lots of flour crud all over the grinder). So I repeated the process all over again, and ordered from another website (for a few pounds extra), who promptly sent me a new, clean one.

Anyway, in the modern world of internets and twitbookfacetubes, the best a (lazy) person can do is to mention it online so Google can index it and turn up in searches for things like "buyspares sucks" and "buyspares problems". So here we are.