Up until August last year (2008) I had never even heard of Techfocus let alone visit their site or buy from them. I first heard about them when I ordered a Fujifilm USB memory pen from another site and inside the package were a bunch of leaflets, one of which was for Techfocus.

I found this very strange that another retailer should package leaflets in their customers' orders pointing them in the direction of their competitors but now having used Techfocus I see perhaps why they would.

Techfocus is basically a company that sell electronics, they are owned by Kinch electronics and based in Lincoln UK. They sell all sorts of electronic equipment such as a limited selection of games consoles, batteries and battery packs, PC and laptop accessories, all sorts of cables such as USB HDMI and the likes and things like memory cards and memory sticks and USB flash drives.

Their website is very, very user friendly and easy on the eye, it has a banner across the top of the page with the sites logo and then to the right of this a picture of a shopping trolley which of course indicates your shopping basket. Down the left had column of the home page you will find a list of all the categories relating to their products for sale which is easy to operate and find the things you are looking for.

Navigating the site can be done with the greatest of ease as the simple layout and correct listing of the items for sale make it almost impossible to go wrong, when you click on a category link it simply opens up a list of all the items that fit into the description of that category.

At the bottom of the home page in small writing are the terms and conditions for using the site and the payment options and delivery options, again these are laid out in simple to understand format and explain everything fully so there can be no mistakes.

The website also offers very good descriptions on the products and I would say the content of the website is very useful and very helpful unlike with some sites that offer good prices but you find yourself searching the web for descritptions of the products because little info is offered.

So far on reading this you could probably be left thinking that I am giving this site a good and positive review but believe me I am not and although as I have mentioned the website is very good and simple to use there are many, many problems with the company itself and that is why I mentioned earlier that I can now see why other companies would not be afraid of you trying this place out as it is unlikely anyone will use it more than once.

The problems start with the stock this company seems to hold which is about none, after a long browsing session on their site back in August 2008 I found that around 60% of the items on their site were out of stock, this is easy to find out because every item has either a green tick or a red cross under them indicating their availability with the tick meaning in stock and the cross meaning out of stock of course.

It also seems like it was all the good offers that were out of stock and it is of course very easy to make yourself look like an inexpensive trader by advertising low prices on stock you do not actually have to sell. The things that were in stock were by no means inexpensive and in fact I really was taken by surprise at how much more expensive they were than other retailers.

One example I remember clearly because it was one of the things I was looking for was an 8GB Sandisk Extreme IV compact flash card, Techfocus had this priced at £79.99 but I actually bought the item from Amazon.co.uk for the much more reasonable price of £65.

This was by no means a one off either, there were in fact many, many items that Amazon and other online stores were miles cheaper for than Techfocus but I did end up making a purchase from the site because they had a special offer on at the time which appealed to me.

The item I purchased (well tired to) was a Sony Ipod dock which had a built in bass unit and also an alarm clock, this was a nifty good looking item that was all around the internet on various sites priced at £59.99 but Techfocus had the very same item for the much reduced price of only £39.99 so it was a no brainer to order it from here.

Ordering was simple just like the rest of the website experience had been, I was offered the option of paying by credit or debit card or even using my Paypal account which is a great thing for online companies to offer in my opinion as many people feel safer using Paypal`s protected payments than using their cards.

On this occasion however I just used my debit card and the transaction was very quick, I chose standard delivery at the cost of £3.58 but I was offered next day delivery at £7.99 if I had wanted.

As it happened the delivery was very quick anyway taking only three working days to arrive but this is where my troubles started, the item sent was not the item I had ordered, it was a Sony Ipod dock but not the one with built in bass unit.

I emailed them and followed the return instructions and I was told they would not even wait till the item was returned but they would instead send out the correct item straight away to avoid me having to wait.

This seemed fair enough and would have been enough for me to forgive the original mistake if they had actually sent the right one as quickly as promised.

I found myself waiting four days then contacting them, I was assured the item had been sent and should be with me that day or the next at latest. After a further three days I again contacted them and told them if I did not receive the item in the next two days I no longer wanted it, to which I was told I should have received a letter from them telling me that the item was no longer available and that is why an alternative had been sent.

The next day I did indeed get this letter which claimed that no one at the company should have told me I would receive the original order because they had none to send and that the item they did send should have been marked as an alternative.

So it was yet another out of stock item or was it more sinister than that? Could they be advertising this item knowing full well they have none and just hoping people accept the alternative?? Anyway I certainly did not accept it and instead asked for me card to be reimbursed which it was after a long 7 days, leaving me totally annoyed by this company and guaranteed never to use them again.

So my overall opinion on the Techfocus experience would be that it all started out very well and the website was very good but it went downhill very quickly with the lack of stock and then went completely horrific once I tried to actually buy an item I wanted so the long and the short of it is that despite the good website this is a company I will never use again nor would I ever consider recommending to anyone else, I awarded it two stars rather than a single one just because the website is at least one positive.

Thanks for reading.

© thebigc1690