02990: Lazada Annoyance

Egg Pizza!

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 388

I don't exactly go crazy for Lazada sale days, especially since my typical purchases as of late are keto food items and ingredients. But I do try to take advantage of whatever limited promotions happen to intersect with my needs.

During the recent Lazada Birthday Sale, I ordered a bunch of keto items with minimal discounts (as usual) and used my one P100 voucher for a replacement pair of Bluetooth headphones since my current ones have stopped pairing for some reason. To be fair, I've used those headphones pretty much daily since I bought as they are my workout headphones, so I understand why they might have reached end of life sooner than later.

The item was supposed to get delivered before the Holy Week and some of my keto stuff managed to arrive in that timeframe. But the headphones kept triggering notifications about it being delayed for one reason or another until I got some weird notifications this week:

Lazada Shipping History

On Monday, this order entered a weird status of "Parcel is Intercepted" and that it would no longer be delivered. I have no idea why this was so, but there it was. And then it somehow arrived at the Logistics Hub the morning after? And at the same time...the order got canceled by the system and the refund was automatically processed. I didn't get push notification for these changes - I only got a pop-up once "my" refund had been approved already. 

I contacted the seller through the Lazada chat system, and they directed me back to Lazada chat support. When I tried asking why my order had been canceled in the Lazada chat, this notice popped up:

Lazada Notification

So...they knew something had happened. They did nothing to proactively inform customers that there's a known error. And this particular prompt only appears if you specifically ask the chatbot why your order was canceled. If you just ask it about canceling orders in general, it sends you to the FAQs about how to cancel an order. WTF LAZADA?

I re-ordered the headphones from the same seller today, figuring that I might as well since it's the last day of the extended birthday sale. However I no longer have the voucher I had last time nor is the seller still offering free delivery, so I'm paying about P140+ more than before. It's a small amount, yes, but the principle of the thing still annoys me. I shouldn't have had to pay it had Lazada not screwed up my order last time. 

I filled out the form where I could report my order, but I'm not sure what to expect in terms of resolution. I think their priority was to make sure everyone's orders got refunded and I doubt I'll get a proper explanation of what happened. I might possibly get a rebate for the difference I paid for the order, but it'll probably require me to sign up for Lazada Wallet or something stupid like that. But I'm going to try to go through proper channels and see what I can dig up if I try navigating their customer service queues. I can be pretty patient and persistent when it comes to things like this - over a decade of BPO experience teaches you to work the system in order to get what you deserve. 

Grr.

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