Ann: 10 mths to 30-4-2017 agg sales by hn, dm & jm franchisees, page-226

I recently had the unpleasant experience of shopping online at Harvey Norman.

To cut a long story short:
- Bought an oven online from Harvey Norman at the end of July 2017. The website indicated that it was in stock when it turned out not to be the case.
- The website took my payment as if it was in stock.
- Got a phone call from the nominated pick up store the following day about the out of stock situation.
- Was offered for a refund if I didn't want to wait for 6 weeks.
- I was willing to wait as I wasn't in a hurry.
- Made the purchase at the end of July and was promised early September for pick up.
- Early September arrived, no phone call, no email from HN.
- In order to find out what is happening to my order, in the next few weeks, I ended up making more than 10 phone calls to various departments: Online Sales team, Local Store, Warehouse of Local Store, each time I was transferred around between calls.
- No one wants to own the responsibility of solving my customer service problem.
- Plenty of promises of returning my phone calls were made and were not kept.
- In the end, I got my oven at the end of September, almost 2 months after I bought it.

One word: NEVER AGAIN!

I don't know how Amazon's legendary service will be like in Australia, but just comparing Harvey Norman against Appliances Online (part of Winnings Group), the experience was night and day!

I even got a comment like this from one of the sales staff at my local HN: "That's the problem with an online sales!"

There were simply too many parties with different incentives that in the end, if it's not going to earn them money, nobody would bother to take up the responsibility.

Online Sales (HQ) vs Local Store Floor Sales Team vs Local Store Online Sales Manager vs Local Store Warehouse Team.

In my honest opinion, the structure of the company is simply too complicated to thrive in the new world order.