Beware the Online Shopping Accidental Double Click

The ABC News Fixer straightens out a big online shopping snafu.

ByABC News
April 24, 2014, 2:13 PM
Here are some tips to avoid Black Friday gimmicks.
Here are some tips to avoid Black Friday gimmicks.
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April 24, 2014 — -- Dear ABC News Fixer: I ordered nine Christmas gifts and a pair of boots for myself from NoMoreRack.com in early December. Unfortunately, the order was placed twice. I immediately emailed the company to advise them of this and to request that the duplicate order be canceled (this was done the same day; well within their "cancellation period" of prior to 9 a.m. the following day). Well, both orders shipped, despite my numerous attempts to contact the company.

Over the course of the next week, 19 packages arrived at my house. It would have been 20, but one duplicate pair of boots never arrived. We discovered that the products ship from individual merchants, not from NoMoreRack, which complicated things.

We continued our attempts to contact the company and even filed a dispute through PayPal. We spent two hours on the phone with various customer "service" reps, who initially said no refunds could be given, then said they could refund us for the duplicate items only if we ship them back to the individual merchants.

- Amy Schmidlin, Elgin, Ill.

[The ABC News Fixer will appear this weekend on ABC News Radio. Tune in to Perspective, airing on your local ABC News station, to see how she helped an ABC News reader and how she could help you.]

Dear Amy: Your first indication that something was very wrong came the same day you placed the order, when you noticed two confirmations from NoMoreRack for separate purchases. Weirdly, the items were not listed in the same chronological order on both confirmations, but they were the same items. Alarmed at the prospect of getting billed twice for $253 and possibly overdrafting your bank account, you emailed NoMoreRack to try to stop the second order.

No one responded, so you called PayPal and they gave you a phone number for NoMoreRack. But you said that a recording said they wouldn’t be answering the phone due to high call volume.

By the time they got back to you, two days later, you were out of luck because the items had already shipped. That didn’t seem fair, though, because their cancellation policy said orders could be canceled by 9 a.m. the next day without consequences, and you had tried to do that.

At any rate, the boxes began arriving. After lots more complaining, you and your mom got NoMoreRack to agree to a refund for the unwanted duplicate items, but only if you’d handle all the shipping to the various merchants, most of it on your own dime, you said. You told the ABC News Fixer you were worried that you might go through the hassle and expense of doing that, only to still face a fight over the duplicate billing.

To say nothing of the missing duplicate pair of boots, which you didn’t want anyway.

Someone get the ABC News Fixer an aspirin!

Luckily, we found a guy who could straighten this out – Cliff Schneider, an attorney and executive vice president of NoMoreRack. He promised to take a look, and five days later, you received an apology from a customer service manager. Two weeks later, you got the refund for the duplicate order. They also offered to let you keep all the extra items if you wanted to (which you did).

As for the cause of your problems, Schneider said the company’s IT people think you may have clicked the “order” button a second time while the first click was processing. You have no memory of clicking twice, but whatever the case, it’s over.