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Bad Experience With CarOrder.comApr 14 '00 Write an essay on this topic.I recently decided to purchase a new Jeep Wrangler and also decided to at least attempt to buy it online. I wanted to buy from a service that handled the whole thing, rather than simply a referral service. My first attempt to purchase was from CarOrder.com, and it was a disaster. Their web site is nice and lets you configure the car and options and gives you a price. Once you have the price, you can either order it right then or store it in your 'virtual garage'. BE CAREFUL if you have a good price and you store it in the virtual garage, because if you come back later and bring up the vehicle profile from the garage, it gets repriced and I found the price jumped around a lot from day to day, usually in the up direction. The first price I got was good, way better than the competitors, but I made the mistake of storing it and looking at it the next day and the price jumped. It still was competitive so I ended up trying to place the order. This is where it went bad. I went through the whole web process of several screens, picked what I wanted and then finally got the 'confirm order' screen. I clicked on 'place the order' and then I waited. and waited. and waited. and finally got back a web server error message from their server indicating a timeout occurred. Now my question was, did I order a car or not? I immediately called their customer service number and the person I spoke to could not find a record of my order so I figured it didn't go thru. However the next day i looked in my virtual garage and it reflected that an order was pending. So I called back. This time the person said I did have an order and a representative would be assigned and would call within 24 hours. No call for two days. I called back. This person couldn't find my order, but gave me the name and email address of the representative that supposedly handled my region. I sent an email. Then the next day I resent the email. Then the next day I resent the email. No response. I called back to that person's direct number. Got voice mail, left a message, no response for two days. I called back again to the customer service number and they told me they were in a different location and couldn't track down the rep, nor could they cancel the order because a 'rep' had to do that. So I went into SPAM mode with email and phone calls. Finally got a call back from someone else who would try to fix my problem. She accused me of 'forcing the order thru' and not using the web site properly. I had no idea what she meant. I just used the web site as it was. Anyway, at this point I had completely lost confidence and I just said cancel the order. She said OK, and about a week later the order disappeared from my virtual garage. Then in a final irony, after another week the original representative finally responded to my email to tell me she did not handle my region and why was I sending here email. So I can't recommend CarOrder.com. I assume the web failure I got was an anomaly so I don't know what happens when things work right. I still wanted to order via internet so I went to CarsDirect.com next. That epinion is coming soon.  |
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