If your first shopping experience with a new company is a good one, in my case, it’s enough to bring me back for more.
Such was the case yesterday with Turnkey, one of the leading European music technology suppliers. With a Digidesign Mbox 2 sitting in my cart on Thomann (Germany) since Thursday, yesterday was the time to buy. A quick scout around told me I could get the Mbox 2 that I wanted for 444 Euro. Not bad I thought, and their factory bundle (with additional plugins) was shipping at 577 Euro. I figured I could go without the factory bundle and spend the extra cash as needed on the plugins for ProTools.
So, I load up the cart, decide on the Mbox and a set of monitors, some cables I’ve been meaning to pick up and before checking out, give KKM’s sound engineer extraordinaire a ring to see if he’s any tips, having suggested one or two Focusrite units to me yesterday, pointing me in the direction of Turnkey.
So, I check them out at Turnkey and after humming and hawing for a while, decide to proceed with the Mbox 2. A quick scout on Turnkey (based in the UK) showed a discount on the Mbox 2 factory bundle – 577 Euro down to 466 Euro.
Sold.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Thomann and over the past few years have spent more money on that site than I care to think of but I was operating on a strict budget here and the more I could squeeze out of the budget, the better. So, I price-check the monitors – cheaper again on Turnkey. In go the credit card details, I press submit, and my payment is rejected “due to insufficient authentication”.
Rather than try and continue the payment again – just in case – I finally get to make a call from my Freetalk Office Dual Phone and get chatting to Colin at Turnkey, explaining what’s just happened online and that I would like to complete my order on the phone (knowing that all my details online are correct and my credit card is perfectly valid).
No problem he says, I read out my Turnkey shopping cart (Mbox 2 and monitors) but the monitors are out of stock and won’t be in until February 4th at the earliest. Knowing I’m still making a saving, I agree to the upsell of the next model up, in return for free shipping (at a saving of 30 euro). He explains a number of monitors, choices, and “what’s selling” to me, the transaction is completed and I go away happy, the phone order as smooth as the online order.
Ten minutes later I get a phone call from Turnkey saying they spotted I had a transaction declined due to a fault on their side, wanting to know if I was ok, did I want to proceed with the purchase, and explaining that they had recently changed their payment methods online (looked like a few teething problems) and apologised for the inconvenience.
“No worries” I said, “you gave a contact number for web sales on the site, I phoned them up and was sorted out in a few minutes”.
To the two lads at Turnkey, thanks very much, you’ve made a new customer for yourself, no doubt about that.
Apologies for the scathing review here but the service I’m receiving from them at the moment is far less than satisfactory.
I rang them up last Wednesday to check that they had stock of a guitar pedal (a present for someone). I was tols they did and if I ordered over the phone I would recieve it the next day. Great I thought, I needed for today to wrap it (Monday). So along with it I went gave my card details and awaited the delivery.
It didn’t show up on the Thursday, and I was told I would recieve an e mail with the delivery details (this also didn’t come). But I thought I’d give it some extra time since I ordered quite close to their cutoff time of noon (when I say close I mean 11.15).
Come Friday at about 12 I checked my e mail, no e mail from Turnkey. So I rang them and got through to the same person who took my order. He said “I don’t know why that hasn’t been dispatched yet we’ve got them in stock, let me check and I’ll call you back”. I didn’t recieve a callback.
So today rolls around (Monday) and still no mail with delivery details. I’ve spoken to 3 different people all of which have told me it should be despatched today but they don’t whats happenened. Not a very good answer if you ask me and only one of them offered to call their dispatch department to find out what was wrong. But guess what still no mail with dispatch details.
Personally I don’t believe they had stock in the first place, and they’re just keen to take your money so they can start earning interest on it. Even though they state on their site they will not charge your card unless it is in stock. So I’m now £150 down with nothing to show for it and I’m going to have to disapoint someone tomorrow.
Thanks Turnkey. I’m going to say they’re absolutly useless and I’m certainly never going to use them again for any instruments or studio equipment I might be buying. Go to digital village instead at least they don’t feed you a pile of BS on the phone.