Complaint Review: B&H Photo-Video PRO Audio - New York New York

I had the worst experience buying a product of my entire life - and I live in Brazil, where the customer support is as bad as it can be.

I travelled to USA on vacation and I decided to buy my long waited CINTIQ, I was staying there from Jan 28th to Feb 11th.

I placed an order on January 31st, tried to buy it with my uncle's credit card, since he has a bank account in the USA. I tried once, it failed and the system notified me that it didn't proceed with the order, I called my uncle and he gave me another card number to use, tried the second time and it failed again and again the site told me that the purchase failed (and also, I received two e-mails from these tries saying the same, that the order failed).

After that, my uncle called his bank and they said they've blocked the purchase - since it wasn't expected such amount to be debited from his account profile - and then he asked then to allow it to proceed. And so they did, I tried a third time and the system said: "Thank you for shopping with us, your order has been confirmed" and I recevied an e-mail confirming that the order had been placed.

This was on January 31st, after 2 days waiting for an e-mail informing on the estimated date delivery, I called the customer support on Friday (Feb 3rd) only to be informed that you guys didn't work on Friday nor Saturday and you would be back on business next Sunday. I waited another 2 days and called on Sunday to the customer support that informed that my purchase had been declined and asked if I wanted to inform another credit card. And so I did, gave another credit card number and this time the representative said the purchase had been approved. When I asked him to confirm a second time if everything was ok with the order he said with this exact words: "Yes, your products should be shipped tomorrow first thing and you should expect them to be delivered in 3 working days".

I checked my e-mails on sunday and saw another confirmation that the purchase had been accepted and that I should wait it to be shipped so I could see an estimated delivery date.

I waited another day and on Feb 6th, monday, I got the e-mail saying that my order had been shipped and that 3 products of my order (out of 4) would come in 3-days and the other one, the most expensive and most important one, the Cintiq would come in 7 days - in other words, February 13th - 2 days after I come back to Brazil. I desperately called the B&H customer support asking then if there was anything that they could do to get my package delivered faster, explained that I wouldn't be in the USA in the estimated delivery date and that I needed it to be delivered in less than 7 days as the other representative assured to me, I told her that I'd do anything, pay any fee that this could imply. She said that she couldn't do anything after the package has been shipped, that I should call the UPS to see if they could do anything.

And then I called the UPS, and they told me that I should ask the store to change it since it wasn't in their system yet, and thus they could change it if the sender requested so. I called again the B&H support and told then all the history so far only to hear the same answer: we can't change it after it's been shipped.

I then waited another day to see if, once it got in the UPS system I could change the delivery somehow, but the answer was the same: we can't change it after the sender has made the shipment.

On February 11th, the day I should be packing my luggage to get in the flight, I received an update from UPS saying that my package was in Salt Lake City, so I rushed to their customer center and asked them if I could pick up the package from there - it was on Saturday - and the woman working there said that nobody working on saturday could access the trailer and retrieve the package to me.

And so I travelled back to Brazil without my package ordered 12 days prior to my trip eventhough I was assured that I would received my order before that - in 3 w-days.