SHOP.CAReviews 220

There is a reason why there are so many negative reviews about Shop.ca, simply put, the customer service is beyond atrocious. I, like many others were lured in with deep discounts, free shipping and easy, free returns. But for myself, what started out easy, quickly turned into a nightmare. The item I purchased was unused by myself, still in original packaging, just had a change of heart. It happens. Their promise of easy returns put me at ease. Once you have contacted a rep with your request, they will send you an email with a prepaid label. I carefully packed everything up, pasted that label and off it went to the post office. This is where the easy part ends.

Because Shop.ca uses merchant partners and don't stock most, if any, of the items they sell, your return gets sent back to the vendor from where it came from. Herein lies the problem: depending on the item(s) you bought and how efficient that merchant partner is, you are in for a potentially long wait.

The "customer service" reps at Shop.ca essentially have no authority to make changes nor have any real information on the item(s) until the vendor approves the return or exchange. What little info they get, they pass to you. Only by being persistent with emails and phone calls will you get a result, as none of the 3 different reps I spoke to seem intent on resolving issues with any sort of urgency.

In the end, I received my refund, well past the advertised time frame and far from the "easy returns" I was led to believe. It could have stretched longer than that had I not insisted on my money back.

Bottom line, you will save with discounts and incentives, but hope you never have to use Shop.ca's "customer service".

Love the site. Order was easy to track and arrived as scheduled! My only complaint is with the product. I ordered a 5 panel set of pictures that proved to be the most frustrating things to hang. The teeth on mounting bracket were so closely spaced that even a small nail would not fit in between. When the next panel was hung, we could not get it to line up by the space between each. If we got the spacing right, the branches wouldn't line up from panel to panel. We ended up removing all the picture hangers and just hung each on a nail by the wooden framing that the canvas was attached to. We just received some other pictures today and checked out the picture hanging brackets on them and they are just fine.

Im having a terrible experience with this website! I bought a soda stream machine for my husband for Christmas, and we received another one so we just sent it back to shop.ca. Now they are saying we damaged it and they sent us pictures which I can only assume are fakes because the ones they used show damage to the item! They are accusing us of using it and trying to send it back when we never even unwrapped most of the parts! Horrible experience.! We never even fully unwrapped the package inside the box and we got pictures back of a used machine! Horrible! I would caution anyone using this site that their return policy is a hoax!

Update: After we threatened the people at SHOP.ca with legal action they finally agreed to give us our money back. We had to write countless emails and endure a lot of frustration. I will never shop there again.

Terrible customer service and shopping experience.

Excellent service. I was waiting for a Tascam CD200 cd player backordered from an online merchant for over two months and no other site had them in stock either due to supply issues. I took a chance and ordered from Shop.ca and called them on Saturday to see if they indeed had them in stock. The salesperson quickly offered to verify that their warehouse did have them and was courteous and cooperative indicating that if they did not have them in stock they would give me a refund on Monday so I would not have to wait again. He called me back within an hour and indicated that he communicated with the warehouse and they would be shipping the player in a few days. The player arrived on Tuesday, well within the indicated timeframe on their website which states that it "ships within seven days". It seems the company is improving their service and I am extremely satisfied with this experience/transaction. Great service even though many in previous reviews indicated otherwise. Thank-you!

The worst shopping ever. I will never spend another penny there. Spend your money at amazon or Walmart.

I have only bought a few things at Shop.ca, but I have had a great experience each time. The customer service is fabulous, even when I had to return something. I would definitely shop here again.

Made a Christmas purchase of a present for my daughter. Successfully (I thought) used a Shop.ca incentive, along with a PayPal incentive on the purchase, AND BOTH CREDITS WERE LISTED ON MY ORDER SUMMARY, only to have PayPal take a different amount out of my bank account (only honoured one of the incentives). Both claim that once the first incentive was applied (the lower one), the second didn't qualify. Continued to suggest I read the 'Terms & Conditions'. Strange that Shop.ca obviously didn't understand them either, as both were applied in the summary of charges e-mailed to me after the transaction! 2+ weeks and numerous e-mails and calls with both, and still no resolution. Brutal Customer Service.

The worst on-line shopping site I have used. Issues from Paypal checkout to changing passwords to locking my account. Told to change browsers because "Internet Explorer doesn't work with our site"

Avoid the frustration and shop anywhere but here.

My first order arrive quickly with no issues, price was good with the coupon available at the time as well.

My 2nd order has been atrocious. Customer support has been useless. The only reason I'm ordering is because of the Paypal 40 off 99 offer that was sent, otherwise everything I'm ordering is cheaper elsewhere. Anywyas, the promo doesn't work. The shop.ca checkout doesn't work with the paypal promo as acknowledged by their support staff. You'd think they'd be on to fix it right away considering its the xmas holiday buying season. However they don't seem to care. They got the free publicity from Paypal already and are just now "accidently" refusing to honor it. Shady business, site has many glitches. Customer service sucks, and the prices are not that good unless you get a promo code.

They don't ship when they say they will, and when I contacted them to cancel the order (cause the supplier hasn't even started to ship a full week AFTER expected arrival- which is 3 weeks after I paid them) I was told they had to contact the supplier to cancel the order and that I MIGHT get a cancellation confirmation OR I might have to wait for the item to arrive (whenever that might be) and then I'm welcome to return the merchandise for free. Ain't that nice. ABSOLUTE CRAP!

Note: Less than 10 minutes after this hit Twitter and Facebook I got an email promising that this will be taken care of swiftly.

I ordered a 55 inch tv which arrived broken in the box. No signs of abuse on the outside, but it had been dropped on its corner and separated the bezel from the screen. I did not take it out of the box, notified them and was told they would get right back to me with return instructions.
That was a week ago, no amount of emails get answers. I called VISA, and they are taking over in a few days.

I ordered a blue plaid shirt and waiting over two weeks for it to be delivered, to make things worse, the shirt was not even blue or the same brand name as the one I ordered. I thought maybe I had selected the wrong shirt and checked out before confirming but my order history and invoice left no doubt it wasn't my error. After I sent an email to Shop.ca, they responded two days later with a shipping label for a refund and that the shirt I wanted was out of stock.

WORST ONLINE PURCHASING EXPERIENCE EVER! I purchased Esso gift cards through shop.ca on Nov 24, called back on Dec 15 to check on my order status. They could not find my order. Waited on hold for 45 min, to talk to a useless customer service (if you could call it customer service) person. Proceeded to email my information, and got a rediculous response asking for the same info that I just provided.

Never again. I should have listened to the reviews.

Anyone who purchased through Shop.ca after the reviews, and has a bad experience deserves it. Me included. You might be the exception, but it's not likely.

Non existent customer service. They took a week to ship my refurbished computer, a Lenovo, and it came with a Windows 7 Product Key that is not valid and says the Windows is not genuine. After over a week of emails and phone calls from what should have been as simple as a patch and new key, I have heard NOTHING.
They did offer to replace it, but I thought it would be faster to get new product key. Silly me, I assumed they would actually do something. After reading reviews, I am dubious about getting a refund or replacement.

This is the worst online shopping company I have ever met. I hope I could rate it for "0 star".
You better stay away from shop.ca.

I ordered a Chordbuddy Jr guitar system for my niece and nephew a couple of weeks ago, after never having heard of Shop.ca before. They offered the best price I could find on the web, and NO SHIPPING PENALTY FOR LIVING IN CANADA. However, after I placed the order, I read the reviews on this site and was mortified. I thought I'd probably never see that little guitar. Well, the guitar arrived at my house 4 business days later. In perfect condition, packaged well so no shipping damage. I told my neighbour about it, and she asked me to order one for her, too. I received the "Your item has shipped" notice the next day, so the second guitar should be here by Monday. Maybe I just got lucky. Not sure. But the number of horrible reviews on here (including some that just say "they don't provide enough details on the merchandise") makes me think there might be a competitor out there submitting false reviews. I would certainly recommend Shop.ca from my experience. I especially appreciate a company that has taken the initiative to broker online shopping for Canadians; if I had ordered this item through a local supplier, instead of being $157, it would have cost another $70 minimum for shipping and customs brokerage fees. That's inexcusable, but it's what we Canadians have been putting up with forever. I will be shopping at Shop.ca again for sure.

Having a very frustrating experience with shop.ca. There is long wait time every time trying to contact them and they offer caller to be called back by their customer reps. Guess what, they would NOT call your back, at least in my case.

Also, it took a long time to get the shipment, one week after being told that the order had been shipped. When I was about the activate the gift cards I purchased, I realized that their numbers are different from those in their system under the same order. In other words, the gift cards I received can't be activated and can't be use at all. Called them for help fixing the issue. It has been two days and they haven't been able to address the issue.

Very unpleasant experience.

Do not trust their 365 days free return! Only 30 days! And you cannot use the item! They will not return used items!

Ordered a Vitamix blender on sale and received in 6 business days in excellent condition.
20% cash back from ebates as well:)
Pretty sweet dealio!