I'm so frustrated at Interdiscount and hope that anyone can give me an advice.
I ordered a monitor and a keyboard from Interdiscount website on 31 Oct 2020. It costs nearly 700 CHF in total. They sold it a bit more expensive than other places but I thought that maybe it's better to buy my stuff from a website that they have actual shops. When I ordered it, they said it can be delivered in 2 working days. But since then, I've been receiving 5 emails about delaying delivery. I called them 4 times but they kept saying that they need to order it from an external supplier. The customer service people even didn't say sorry to me. I checked on their website, they are still selling the same monitor that I ordered with guarantee to deliver in few working days.
I am so annoyed because it seems like they are cheating customers by abusing our money (I already paid for it) and playing the "hanging game". If other customers buy the same model on their website, they will be in the same situation like mine. We will have to cancel it when we are tired of waiting. While they are abusing your money.
I have been waiting 1.5 months for this monitor and if I cancel it now, I feel cheated because I may have to wait for long time to get it from another supplier because of Christmas time. And Interdiscount can get of any responsibilities after all.
Can anyone give me an advice about what I can do? Like any website or anywhere that I can write my complaint about them? Whenever I call them, it seems like my complaints are never really noted down at all.
Sure, you can sue. Anyone can sue anyone else any given time for anything you like. In the worst you will lose in court, have to bear court cost and the defendants expenses.
It is up to you to know the risk end the likely hood that you will win.
Happily the first stage in the process is the justice of peace (Friedensrichter), where the cost is minimal and the other party cannot claim lawyer expenses (at least AFAIK).
If you want to leave a rating you can use toppreise.ch and google.ch
Sue for damages, no. You can cancel the order and get your money back. They have no responsibility for their inability to fulfill the order.
Write to an official complaints address or someone high up if you want and/or leave negative reviews elsewhere. It'll likely make no difference at all.
I ordered something from them a while back. It was defective. I sent it back and the website said I'd get a refund. They sent me another defective item instead so I had to also drag that one to the post-office and send it back with a note and they then refunded my money. Even though this went through their online returns system I never got any email confirmation or anything but, it did all work out in the end.
Also! in doing this over the course of a few weeks I noticed that when I bought the item it was a non-sale price of say 100 CHF, a few days later it was 130 CHF in a "15% off!" sale, then a few days later 115 CHF. Like many things here, they just make it up as they go along.
This is clearly not correct - a shop can't just blame their supplier for failure to deliver, the responsibility is theirs to only write a contract they can complete.
If the purchaser gets damages out of the shop or similar, the shop would have to sue their supplier if they felt it appropriate.
Whether there is any actual damage is a different point - most contracts exclude incidental damages, so probably the best OP could sue for is loss of interest on the money, which would be almost zero anyway.
Just cancel the order and get it from somewhere else with better availability. It's just a monitor and keyboard so stop talking nonsense about taking legal action when you haven't even asked for a refund.
In more serious terms. I ordered a few items from a new webshop for the first time last week and I read the terms and conditions. They were something like this:
OP: just read interdiscount terms and conditions. Waiting more than a month is self-inflicted damage. If Interdiscount refuses an order to can cancel the order and refund, don't less pass more time and contact the credit card company. The credit card protection is limited to only 2-3 moths after purchase date.
Have you heard about digitec.ch? In my experience they are very reliable, so if you can see the monitor on their website you can trust the expected delivery date indicator.
We recently experienced delays from digitec. They wrote politely to say so, then later again. In their third apology, they offered that we could choose between waiting for delivery some weeks or months hence, or getting a full refund. That worked smoothly. We took the refund, and went to Migros.
Digitec/Galaxus is getting a bit like Amazon in that they are now shipping some items by third parties.
The problems with this, for the customer, are two-fold. Firstly you have absolutely no idea how long the order will really take to arrive - experience shows it's much longer than the stated time.
Secondly, once you push the "place order" button, you cannot quickly go back and change the order (which you can do if the items are from the Digitec warehouse).
I did this last week which was a bit annoying as I wanted to add another item so I would be above the order total cost threshold and not have to pay for postage.
You can't sue for interest on the money... if the product is delayed form the supplier then that's the way t is and you just need to get your money back. No delivery date is contractually agreed, it's all best endeavours.
The pandemic has made PC hardware in VERY short supply and many stores, including Digitec etc, have delivery dates that are all over the place. You either just wait for the product or cancel the order and shop elsewhere.
While it is true that delivery dates are not always binding, neither can they be completely ignored or set unreasonably short when the supplier can't meet them - to quote from that page:
"Nonetheless, it would be unfair – and would constitute an infringement of the LCD – to indicate delivery times which are too short and impossible to meet solely in order to attract customers."
An example which is common is that the supplier can't deliver orders even though the site is still advertising the product as deliverable.
Of course this isn't necessarily much help - it's clearly unfair practice, but an individual wouldn't get much benefit from taking them to court. That mismatch in power / impact isn't limited to Switzerland.