i phone peter jones up at home
and i make him do my tech support
The recovery at Expansys - the consumer electronics etailer owned by Dragons' Den meanie Peter Jones - has proved shortlived. The wireless tech web seller and provider of mobile networks edged back into the black in fiscal 2012 ended April in spite of currency headwinds and hard up UK consumers. Sadly for Jones and other …
'in spite of currency headwinds and hard up UK consumers'....
....or perhaps their steady failure has been down to excessive overpricing, non-stop and impossible to opt-out-of spamming, constant expectation-creation and then letting people down, shoddy after-sales service and mistakes in deliveries.
I used to be cautiously willing to use them if they had what I wanted within ~15% of what I'd consider reasonable. That pricing never happened though - any time they had what I was looking for, the price was at least 25% higher than some other vendor in whom I'd place equal or greater trust. Given the tales of spam avalanches from other commenters, I'm glad I refrained from doing so now (and for more reasons than just the dirty feeling you'd get from contributing to that arrogant pillock's business...)
Sucks for the people who work there, though. Not their fault the company's apparently wedded to a shit business model :(
They're just not competitive. Hard up customers? You'd have to be a total spendthrift to even consider purchasing from Expensive. Not to mention that having paid through the nose you can expect sub-par post sales service.
All in all, it's a business that deserves to be shut down, not kept on life support.
Good.
I bought a Nexus One from them and they really messed me about when its power button broke.
They first tried to make me call HTC. HTC UK won't touch it as apparently it originated from Vodafone Germany (strange considering Expansys sold it as a SIM free UK model).
Then they tried to claim the phone was out of warranty (when the (german) warranty documentation stated 2 years, and anyway there's the usual SOGA acrobatics if that was the case)
Then they tried to claim it had water damage and they wanted a chunk of money to send the phone back unrepaired or to pay £whatever to get it repaired outside of warranty. The phone spent its time in an Otterbox Defender with the most exposure to water being very light rain, there is no way there is water damage. Strange how they didn't prove it by sending pictures of the water sensors or anything.
I didn't have time to deal with it so I bought a new phone (not from Expansys of course). I'm glad they're failing miserably and I won't be propping up their finances any time soon.
I moved on from Expansys in 2004 after buying an iPaq HX4700 which was sold as UK spec, only to discover it was in fact a grey market import from Malaysia (where they use the same electrical system so supplied with a regular UK 3-pin plug) but with questionable HP warranty and a more limited WiFi channel selection than you would expect for a UK device (as it was effectively US spec).
Expansys eventually came clean on the matter, promising to ship only UK spec models in future, although this was more likely a reaction to the loss of a court case brought by HP than any customer concern. And their lack of interest in assisting with future warranty issues - preferring instead to fob the customer off to HP - was also quite telling.
Since then I have avoided them like the plague - such a shabby, underhand, deceitful (and overpriced) outfit. There are quite a number of e-tailers out there that are more honest, pleasant and yet still cheaper than Expansys.