Complaint Review: Ashford Ashford.com

I ordered a watch from ashford.com as a gift on 12/22/2004 and they were advertising guaranteed delivery by christmas with free shipping on any order over $150(and this was way over).

12/23/2004 I get confirmation email at 1am...sounds good right?
Well in this email, it says if you recieved a completed order message that the bottome then your item shipped, and if you recieved a pending order message at the bottom then follow the instructions at the bottom.

Well, I got neither message at the bottom of this email(the only email they ever sent), what I did get is an invoice with all the standards, order number, quantity, item number, price, ship to:, description etc.

So I'm thinking looks good, then on the 24th, yes the day before christmas I still have not recieved anything, so I log on their order tracking and "track my order" and guess what, it says this item is backordered with no expected date at all....WTF how can you guarantee delivery on an item you dont have??? Thanks for ruining christmas, ashford.com sucks.

To add insult to injury I call to complain and they say its not their fault that they guaranteed delivery on an item they didnt have, nor did they try to contact me the next day to tell me the item I am expecting delivered before chistmas isnt here so can I please order something else, nope they just did nothing, no email, no phone call, no shipping. The CSR told me "let me give you an example, lets say I have ten items and a million people order them at the same time, well thats what happened".

So I told him let me give you an example "You inventory is hooked to your order system and when a customer places an order, the computer subtracts the item" He literally was dumfounded and said "yeah, that could happen too".

Next question I had was is ashford.com still a publicly traded company? And he tells me he's not that far up the totem pole. What an a*s...thank you assford.com I hope your shareholders go broke financing this joke.

Derek
phoenix, Arizona
U.S.A.