I'm not sure I do love to shop with Love2Shop

This weekend we tried to use a Love2Shop gift card at a local retailer. We got to the till, and felt some trepidation about presenting this unusual form of payment to the cashier, but actually the staff were OK and seemed to know what to do (after a bit of discussion of course). Unfortunately the transaction would not go through. The system said that the card wasn't authorised. There was nothing the staff or ourselves could do about that right there and then. So we left, feeling slightly disgruntled, without our goods.

"Maybe we haven't actually activated the card after all," we thought. So we go through the online process again. The process proceeded in exactly the same way as usual and there was no indication whether we had already activated the card or not. I can't help thinking this needed to say "Card already activated" at some point (1st black mark in the book)!

On Sunday when we went back to check the balance on the card we hit the real problem. The £95 transaction had been debited from the card after all. We still had the receipt which said tender cancelled at 15:24, but at 17:01 the money had been deducted from our balance anyway. Aaarrrggghhhh! Since the Love2Shop customer service was only available in normal office hours (2nd black mark in the book) we decided to call the retailer first. They were quite helpful, understood our problem, but had no record of the money going through to them (only the cancelled transaction) - so unsurprisingly directed us to contact the card provider.

Since we couldn't phone them over the weekend we e-mailed them using the address from the Contact Us section on their website. On Monday we received a reply:

As the card is a Flexecash Card you will need to contact them direct. The number you require is 0844 375 0739. I hope this helps.

Black mark number 3: Why not give me these details on the Love2Shop site? Black mark number 4: Oh I see it is an 0844 number! Black mark number 5: Oh and you haven't even passed my query on to them?
Thanks. You may "hope that that help"s - but that is a poor attempt at customer service in my book. I am actually quite tolerant of this kind of thing in general. Mistakes can be made and let's face it we Brits put up with this stuff. But this is supposed to be "customer service". Why shouldn't we expect it to be as helpful as possible?
To avoid using the 0844 number (and potentially sitting on hold in the middle of my working day) I tried using the contact form on the flexecash website. It didn't work! All I got was an error page.Black mark number 6!!!
As it happens, when I did get through using the number provided, I was connected relatively quickly and the problem was resolved. A refund was given. There had been problems with the computer authorising the transactions over the weekend. Whilst this does not give me great confidence in using these gift cards at least it is now resolved. Hooray!