Anyone heard of Komplett? (Komplett)

Member Name: Deru

Product:	Komplett
Date:	05/02/08 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quite cheap on some items

Disadvantages: Average Customer Service, don't stock certain brands and some more expensive items

Komplett is an online retailer of computing and electrical goods. First impression of their website is that it looks quite professional. One thing I noticed is that anyone with a screen resolution setting lower than 1024 x 768 (have a big screen) would need to scroll more to see everything. Not good for those who like their resolutions low. There's nothing special about the site design. It's much like many other online stores. Company logo in the top left, navigation bar down the left, stuff like "View Cart", "Account", "Help" in the top right, and products with pictures down the middle. The site is usually up but I have them seen them down once where I was given an internal server error as soon as I entered their homepage address, but it came back a few hours later.

Navigation is easy, as with most well-designed, professional websites. Item description pages are well laid out and most are illustrated with a picture.

Product specifications are broken down into how you would normally find them. You're even given external links to reviews from other sites, the manufacturer page, product information page and a 'Support' page on the description but the Support link says "The page cannot be found". This support page is supposed to be on the 'official' Sapphire website but it probably moved. Fair enough, Komplett have a lot of products so they haven't realized it had moved. One link that doesn't work is their link that lets us download their price list (as an Excel spreadsheet), at the very bottom down the centre of the page. The file is labelled as 150KB in size but the link gives me the dreaded 'The page cannot be found' error page. Their Help section won't load up for me either! I noticed a few spelling errors here and there but nothing major but I have noticed the stock level changing regularly so this is either automatically done by their stock control system or altered manually.

When you're in the product description page, there's usually a 'Show specification' link. Clicking on this gives you a more detailed specification, sometimes with very technical information that's enough to make you bash your head in from not knowing what the hell they mean. Description pages also tell you the weight of items, if you ever need to know the weight, and of course, the amount of stock there is of the item.

Something I like about the site is that you can cancel and amend your orders if they haven't been sent out. When you're browsing a category, you can sort the products by name or by price. Furthermore, an excellent feature is their filter. You can filter out items by specifying a Min and Max price and by items that are In-stock, as well as being able to hide images (love this one)! Great if you're on a 56K dialup connection!

I have no real complaints here asides that Excel spreadsheet thing, which I would have liked to get my hands on, and the help section.

7/10

ORDERING

As always, you will need to register an account with them. That means providing them with your name, address, telephone number, email address, etc. You can choose from Personal, Business or Government/Other as account types. You can add orders to your Cart before registering though, but you will be asked to either register or sign in when you 'Check Out' your order.

When you check your Cart, you can edit the quantity of each item inside your Cart or remove items. You can pay by credit card and you can choose whether you want them to store your credit card details or not. When paying, the pages are encrypted so your details are safe.

Overall, very easy.

9/10

PRODUCTS and PRICES

I think that they have a very good selection of products. They do not have as much as Ebuyer but an adequate selection, still. Some items listed or not in stock, ordering their back order items means that you would have to wait for stock before you get your item. Komplett can post the items that are in stock first to you, but at extra cost so I'd only order stuff that is in stock or nearly in stock.

Some prices aren't that great (at least, I don't think so) but many of their items are damn cheap! As always, this is the case compared to high street prices but they do give other online stores a run for their money. That's just what I like to see.

Examples: (All prices exclude P&P but include VAT)

* Sapphire 9600XT 128MB ATI Graphics card
PC World store price - £129.99 / PC World Web Exclusive - £120.00
Komplett.co.uk - £95.00

* HDD mounting brackets (3.5" to 5.25" bay converters)
Maplin - £3.99
Komplett.co.uk - £1.50

* Pentium 4 3.0GHz Prescott 1Mb cache
CCL Computers (one of my other favourite PC component sites) - £133.26
Komplett.co.uk - £123.00

* USB 2.0 A-B 1.8M cable
Argos - £7.99
Komplett.co.uk - £1.20 (for a 2M one because I didn't see a 1.8M one (longer, for less))
(but ones from Ebuyer are under £1)

Overall, very good prices and the sort I like. Some items are better value than others. I've noticed that they do not stock products from certain manufacturers or higher spec items. For example, their PDA selection doesn't have the more expensive models, whereas does.

9/10

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer service is okay...sometimes. For the purpose of seeing what kind of response I got from them, I decided to ask them a question about one of their products. I got a reply within 24 hours but it didn't answer my question. Something unusual about my response is that it wasn't a very formal reply. I don't usually expect that from a company with a big website like Komplett. I asked what one of the specifications meant for one of their product (a USB 2.0 Flash Disk). The particular specification only shows up, 'after' you click on the 'show specifications' link and unfortunately, the staff member didn't know where this particular specification was and was not able to answer my question!

The other thing I asked was whether the product included a driver CD. The staff member tried to assure me that a driver CD was not necessary, as it installs itself after I plug the device in. That IS true but NOT with Windows 98. Windows 98 requires a driver CD and a lot of similar products DO include a driver CD, in case you have a Windows 98. The staff member could have said 'yes' or 'no', but my question remains unanswered. There's probably a website where you can download the driver from. Well, at least I got a response.

I've also had to return a faulty item once. After getting RMA authorisation and sending the item back, I was refunded in around a week, which is pretty good as some other companies I've gotten refunds from have taken a month or more.

8/10

DELIVERY

Delivery is pretty quick. Once you've placed your order, your order is usually delivered to you within a few days if you use their standard delivery. This costs £5, so it's best to order more items in one go to make it worth while. You have the option to receive your item within 1 to 2 days but this costs a whopping £16.88! Now that's a bit of a rip-off! Might be DHL's fault though. Okay, you don't have to use that method. I just hope you don't urgently need the items. You can choose to have items delivered together or have them delivered as soon as they are in stock. Having them delivered separately will increase the amount of postage you pay so I'd recommend the 'deliver together' option. They let you track orders via the Initial City Link site. (Some people dislike Initial City Link though).

SUMMARY

I've only ever experienced downtime on one occasion, site is generally fast (I'm on broadband though), they have nice products and at good prices, but customer service is only okay from my experience and there were a few dead links on the site. It's a shame they lack certain brands and some higher specification items but it is still worth shopping with them. To make shopping there worthwhile, I would wait till you have more to buy so you save on postage.

OVERALL: 8.5/10

Very good site but not exceptional.

Thanks for reading.

Summary: Supplier of IT goods