What to do when an online store sends you an order twice (and charges you for it).

Today at work there was a huge controversy; Sarah had discovered that an online store from which she had ordered christmas presents had charged her twice (claiming that she had made the exact same order 10 minutes prior to her actual order, and the shop had "forgotten" to send her any confirmation of this magical order). Now they want to charge her the postage to make the returns even though she had not made the order - she tracks all of her credit card transactions so she is on top of her spending (a wise decision).

So she e-mailed them once more, they "amended" her account to show that an order had been put in and accepted responsibility for not having put that order there in the first place. What Sarah found most frustrating about this order is that it would have required time travel for her to make it; she was at a pot luck. Unless (a) her thoughts about this order somehow made it to her computer, placed the order and passed her credit card verification or (b) she managed to mind control her cat to do it while she was out, she really didn't understand how this had happened.

I feel her pain, it is rubbish when a shop decides that they can chop and change their shopping rules or a system glitch has occurred and the shop believes itself to be infallible. It is even more rubbish when you realise that there is little you can do about it other than stamp your feet and complain to the shop and the regulating authorities. Yes, there's always the forum rampage option...but it is difficult to be taken seriously and some people even ridicule you for raising the point in the first place.

Regardless, the latter two options won't get your money back and, in some cases, neither will the first.

After an afternoon of back-and-forth e-mails in which the offending store wouldn't budge on their position and stated clearly that if she wanted to return the items (which she hasn't yet received) she would be responsible for postage costs.

So we put our heads together. If she doesn't receive the items she can always tell the store and, according to store policy, they will refund her . If she does receive the items, she's not too keen in paying for postage of the returns because it's quite weighty and will be expensive. Moments passed and then it hit me: hold an office sale.

The option of selling these things to other people, not to make money but to make sure the items go to a proper home and reimbursing you for the error, is not an obvious choice. We stop ourselves with self-defeating thoughts, convinced that no-one would want to buy the items. After a few e-mails to other departments, other people joined in and we've now scheduled an out-of-hours office sale (there will be no second hand items as we have a jumble sale once every few months) that will be held at Sarah's house and have made a few new friends. Not a bad day's work.

The reason we wanted to blog about this is that these things happen and a lot of the time, as consumers, we feel pressured to keel over and follow the store's procedure. When in actual fact we have a lot more options than might occur to us in that moment of credit-card-bill-induced-panic.