d l.

What a complete load of amateurs. Shocking service from start to finish. Placed my order on the 14 November from a diamond style shop sale for presents for my wife for Christmas. Plenty of time. Despatched on the 28th November (understandable as they have to let the sale finish before depatching in bulk). Then nothing. Tracking info didn't work on the Vente App which initially gave me cause for concern. Called Vente who said they would raise a ticket and come back to me within a few days with some initial answers. Nothing... Called them again. Very nice but completely not in any way concerned about urgency of order (Christmas now a few days away). Didn't turn up by Christmas - cue Christmas even panic to find other gifts. Since then have asked them for a full refund. Apparently can't do that as they need to allow the courier 30 days to respond and try and find the package. 30 days! Absolute joke. Won't refund until courier confirms goods are lost. And then no doubt at least another 7 days to refund. Tried to compensate me with a £6 credit against future orders which was downright insulting. DO NOT USE THESE PEOPLE

Easiest thing to do is paste a copy of the letter I sent to Daniel C (CEO), Nicky D (Customer Services Manager) & Laura G (PA to Directors). I gave them 7 days to respond and none of them could be bothered.

Dear Sir / Madam

I am writing to you to express my absolute disgust at an order which I placed through you for a child's bed.

Before I wrote this I searched for a contact name to address this letter to and came across a lot of feedback from other very irate customers on multiple websites. So my guess is this letter will probably be either thrown in the bin, filed at the bottom of a pile of paper never to be seen again or folded up and used to stop the desk wobbling. I sincerely hope you prove me wrong….

Order number is 2***9 just in case you are interested and still reading this letter.

I ordered this bed by speaking to your customer service team. And this was the only good experience I had in this whole sorry order. The lady was charming and very helpful. She talked me though the options and explained the different mattresses etc. She also explained that Saturday delivery was an extra £3 (which I thought was very good and questioned but she confirmed this was correct).

Based on her recommendation I placed my order. She confirmed all the pricing to me verbally and took my card details and confirmed payment.

About 10 minutes later I received an email confirmation of my order from you. I was somewhat surprised to see that despite discussing which mattress I wanted in great detail and then making the decision with your CS representative, she had put a completely different mattress in my order which was around £50 more expensive. The order confirmation also said Saturday delivery was in the region £18-19!

I called you again to explain the situation and another CS representative immediately told me I must be wrong and that the other CS lady would never had said that. She was immediately on the defensive and became quite aggressive about the whole thing. Having seen the layers and layers of other negative feedback I can understand why she might have behaved in this way – but it is still unacceptable.

I suggested she go and check her recording of the previous conversation (which I am sure you take for training purposes….) and she proceeded to put me on hold for 7 minutes. As you can imagine I was starting to regret doing business with you more and more!

Eventually she came back, without so much as any form of apology, and grudgingly amended the order.

By the next day I still hadn't had any new order confirmation so I had to call you again to get you to send it. It did turn up this time.

The bed turns up with the wonderful XDP courier you use (I will come back to them in more detail later). My heavily pregnant wife cannot lift heavy things and initially the driver won't even put the packages through the door into the hallway which is disgraceful! Two extra steps is all we were asking him to take. He did ultimately agree to do this so a big thank you to XDP.

I start putting the bed together and then pull out the end pieces to find one of them is cracked and damaged. I call you CS team again and request a replacement and this is no problem. But I am told you can't deliver on a Saturday despite all the issues I have had and the fact that you have sent me damaged goods. I threaten to cancel the entire order and suddenly a Saturday delivery becomes possible – amazing!

I continue putting the bed together (there are 5 different boxed elements) and open up the flat packed drawers. One corner has a compression dent and has clearly been dropped at some point. And the top of the frame by the top drawer also has some split wood and is damaged. I decide that I can't be bothered to waste yet more of my time with your CS team and I hope that once it is put up and partially hidden under the bunk bed the damage will be hidden. I can confirm this is not the case and the damage is visible. Am I going to bother requesting some kind of refund? Again judging by the other customer feedback there is little point in pursuing this route as I am sure I will be either fobbed off with some excuse or told to return the whole unit – which I can't be bothered to dismantle and re-pack.

Back to the pick-up for the damaged end parts. Organised for Wednesday 20th August. No confirmation from you on this but I am starting to get the feel for how you operate so not expecting anything too helpful. My wife stays in and mid-morning I call you to find out what is going on, only to find that no pick-up has been organised! It is now re-organised for tomorrow – and guess what? Still received no email confirmation confirming the pick-up – but what the hell? That is how you do business.

Now onto XPD. Despite the above mention of their extremely unhelpful delivery person (given the circumstances), they claim to send out emails first thing in the morning confirming your delivery time slot to within 3 hours. Which would be very useful if it worked! On the only two occasions where I have had these emails they haven't arrived until the evening of the said day – which is extremely unhelpful. On the one occasion I have called them I gave up after 25 minutes of hold music because no-one had taken my call.

So between the two of you, you seem to have an amazing customer experience…... How you ever managed to get a second round of funding from a James Caan backed initiative (according to Jennifer C****h on LinkedIn) completely amazes me based on the horrific customer experiences I see all over the web about your company – and we are talking LOTS of negative feedback!

As previously mentioned, I have great reservations about any form of feedback from you or indeed any form of compensation for the huge amounts of my time which you have wasted. But I will be reasonable and give you 7 days for some feedback and an apology. Failing that I will take great joy in sharing my truly awful experience with Corban Direct on the web and with James Caan's company as I am sure he would appreciate knowing what drivel he is investing in.

I await your reply

Yours Faithfully

Dylan Lloyd

Updated 26th August
The next scheduled pickup for Friday 22nd August. Still had received no email regarding pickup confirmation so called your customer services on the Friday morning. They could not give me a time but assured me it was being picked up on the said day. They gave me a tracking number which I then entered into the XPD website. Unsurprisingly there was no record of my pick up. I called back your customer services team and was again assured it was definitely being picked up. They put me on hold for 5 minutes and then came back to me saying they couldn't get through to XPD either but not to worry as it was "definitely being picked up today" and your CS team would keep trying and call me back when they got further info. Cue tumbleweeds blowing past and unsurprisingly no further communication and even more unsurprisingly no pick up!

Updated Tuesday 26th
XPD turn up unannounced to pick up 3 parts of the bed (luckily my wife happened to be in). I had explained on at least 2 occasions to your customer services team on my many previous calls that it was only the end part and NOT the mattress as well. The fact that XPD was only picking up one part confused the hell out of them but we got there in the end.

Updated 27th August
Received an email from XPD at 9.20 am that they are due to pick up some items today…. I have now officially given up on Corban and XPD……