GameStop does not deserve your business

TL;DR GameStop doesn’t know how to run a working web site that is capable of taking people’s money, and doesn’t know how to provide decent customer service when people run into problems because of their broken web site that won’t take people’s money. Don’t patronized GameStop; they don’t deserve your money.

On October 9, I tried to buy a gift certificate at http://www.gamestop.com/.

The web site happily accepted my order, including accepting the credit card information I entered, which I assure you was valid and correct.

Forty minutes later, I received this email:

Dear Valued Customer,

The order #___ that you placed with GameStop.com or EBgames.com has been cancelled.

If you did not cancel this order yourself, it may be the result of our system being unable to process your order.

In the event you did not cancel your order, please try these steps:

1. Contact your financial institution and confirm that the information they have on file matches with all the information you included when you placed your order.
2. Place another order on www.gamestop.com using a different form of payment.

If you require any further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email and we will be more than happy to assist you further. You may also contact us at 1-800-883-8895.

OK, I thought to myself, apparently they’re having trouble processing credit-card payments. That’s annoying, but they also accept PayPal, so I’ll just try again using my PayPal account.

So I placed the order again. I even got an email message from PayPal confirming that the order had been placed successfully. Then, 30 minutes later, I got the cancellation email again.

I replied to the second cancellation email as follows (I also tweeted at them; they never responded to my tweets):

Holy crap.

I placed an order for a gift card with my Visa card. You cancelled it.

I tried again with my PayPal account. You cancelled it again.

WTF is your problem? Do you not want my money?

Several hours later, they responded as follows:

We truly sorry for this big inconvenience with the order cancellation. Based on our system we were not able to verify the payment information. You are more than welcome to place a new order at any time.

Don’t worry, your payment method was never charged for the canceled item. Any related authorization hold on your credit or debit card account will be released in accordance with your financial institution holds policy. Feel free to contact your financial institution for more information.

I responded:

You have got to be kidding me.

Both times I ordered, my payment information was valid. PayPal even sent me email confirming that I had successfully arranged payment through them.

Why should I waste my time trying a third time? What reason have your given me to believe you won’t be “not able to verify the payment information” yet again?

Please tell me why you were unable to verify the payment information. Please give me some reason to believe it is going to be different if I try again.

And if you can’t do that, please stop wasting even more of my time and escalate this to someone who can.

Four days later, they finally responded as follows:

I apologize for this big inconvenience, your order was cancelled due to payment failure. At this point, there is not valid reason to escalate this issue because, we did not charge your card. Besides we don t have specific details why your financial institution declined the transaction. This issue must be handle with them not with GameStop.

I replied:

You people are really ticking me off.

1) My credit card did not decline the transaction. My credit card is valid, and they notify me when they decline transactions, and they didn’t notify me.

2) PayPal did not decline the transaction. In fact, I GOT EMAIL FROM PAYPAL CONFIRMING THE TRANSACTION:

The fact that PayPal confirmed the transaction and then you cancelled it proves that BOTH orders I tried to place, the one placed via PayPal and the one placed with my Visa card, were cancelled AT YOUR END, not at the bank.

YOU cancelled both of these orders. NOT my financial institution.

And you waited OVER FOUR DAYS to reply to my support request, and then when you finally replied, you provided me with wrong, useless information, and refused to take responsibility for the problems which are CLEARLY at your end?!

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. It will be a cold day in hell before I give you a penny of my money.

Jonathan Kamens

Surely anything you can buy at GameStop, you can also buy somewhere else. So do that, and don’t reward these people for their incompetence and monumentally bad customer service.