I’m not sure what effect this is going to have on customer service, but it seems that Dabs.com has been bought by BT. The move has been anounced by BT as an attempt to advance their position in the retail sector.

One of the problems that customers currently face with Dabs.com, when they have support issues, is find a eral person to talk to. Several years ago Dabs.com announced they were to drop telephone customer support in favour of email support. This has lead for many customers to days, weeks even months of delays in try to get a refund or a replacement for a defective product.

The Dabs.com website has recently had a face lift which saw the addition of several useful tools for finding the product you require. Dabs.com also seems to consitently offer the best prices and, when they get their act together, delivery is generally quite quick.

If, under BTs management, the customer support can be vastly improved I may even be tempted to shop at Dabs.com again.

A Magistrates court judge in the UK has decided it is legal to launch an email based denial of service (DoS) attack against email servers. The ruling came in a case brought against a teenager who launched an attack against his former employer. The judge decided that although during the attack a large volume of email traffic was being targeted at the server, they could not be said to have caused unauthorised changes as defined by the act.

This brought to thinking about Dabs.com. The company has notoriously bad customer services which is handled only via email. How damaging would it be for the company if its customer services department was crippled because it was being flooded by emails?

To be honest I don’t really think that an email DoS could really have much impact on its already appalling levels of service, but its nice to know that we’ve got the legal go ahead to launch such an attack.

So, who’s up for the challenge? (Please note that I am not advocating any illegal activity here!)

For those of you out there that are being f**ked over by Dabs.com, or are thinking of making a first time purchase from them, you may find some solace in this article by Ian Betteridge.

The article is an overview of some of the rights of consumers in the UK and gives a good guide to your rights when buying goods and to the level of service you should expect if anything goes wrong.

Link from BoingBoing

Brilliant! I’ve just had my first hit from the Dabs.com domain in a while… the only question is “Why are they looking at my site?”. Is it a customer services / marketing employee being sent to investigate bad press or is it a disgruntled employee?

Any way, prompted by the appearance of the Dabs.com domain in my logs I decided to have another quick search to see what others have to say about Dabs’ bad customers services. I came upon this amusing story by “Chris”.

Its seems from his experience that if you are having trouble with Dabs.com then you should (failing getting a response from Customer *cough* Services) try contacting Bolton Trading Standards with your complaint. I don’t have the contact details for them but will try and find them. Chris also offers some good advice as to how you handle a complaint with Dabs.com. You should remember to keep a record of all correspondence with Dabs.com and NEVER be abusive otherwise you’ll loose all your rights.

I was just using Google to see how hhigh in the Dabs.com ranking I am (5th if you search for Dabs contact) and I came across another Dabs.com contact on the CNetChannel website.

I have no idea if this person still works for Dabs or if this number is still valid for Dabs:

Louise Derbyshire
Phone: +44 (0)870 429 3701
lderbyshire@dabs.com

I’m not sure how recent these contact details are so I don’t guarantee getting any results:

person:       Paul Sharrock
address:      dabs.com plc
address:      Direct House
address:      Wingates Industrial Park
address:      Westhoughton
address:      Bolton
address:      BL5 3XD
address:      UK
phone:        +44 1942 853451
fax-no:       +44 1942 857451
e-mail:       psharrock@dabs.com

There is also these company details which I don’t think I’ve posted on my site before:

dabs.com PLC
Direct House, Lancaster Way
Bolton, Greater Manchester BL5 3XD
UK
Phone: +44 (0)1942 853100
Fax: +44 (0)1942 857100

Every day I get people visiting my website in the hope of finding out some nuggets of information that might help them contact a really person and the now very un-personal Dabs.com. I have in the past posted telephone numbers for Dabs,.com and [work] email addresses of their employees in the hopes that atleast some visitors to my site will get the answers they deserve.

I am now able to offers visitors to my site an email address to which they can send any pieces of information which you feel could help my website. Whilst I personally am not able to assits in any Dabs.com customer disputes there may be other people out there reading my site that can.

The email address is: dabs.comsucks@gmail.com.

Oh the pain, the pain! Its such a pain in the a*se trying to get Dabs to do anything.

My current problem with Dabs.com is that I have decided that I’m not going to be using their not quite so wonderful services any more. Therefore, I would like to delete my details from their system just incase the decide to violate the data protection act and perform unauthorised processing on my personal data.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I continue my war against dabs.com (they tried to screw me with a Canon Ixus 500… owww!) I have dug up yet more contact details for the “low price - low customer care” company.

These details were obtained from the Network Solutions whois search results for dabs.com.

Administrative Contact   :
  Fletcher, Steven
  sfletcher@dabs.com
  Direct House, Lancaster Way
  Westhoughton
  Bolton, Greater Manchester BL5 3XD
  UK

  Phone: +44 (0)1942 853488
  Fax: +44 (0)1942 857488

Update:
I’ve had another look on the Whois records for Dabs, and it appears that they have a different record for their Dabs.net entry. If you’ve had no luck with the previous numbers you may like to try this contact (I’m not sure if this John Fletcher and the Steven Fletcher above are related!?):

Administrative Contact:
    Fletcher, John
    jfletcher@dabs.com
    Direct House
    Wingates Industrial Park
    Westhoughton
    Bolton, Lancashire BL5 3XD
    UK
    0870 129 3348

I have finally got a response from Dabs.com saying that they have authorised the return of my camera. So I’ve now got to package it up and post it off to them.

Will Dabs.com pull though in the end with their dignity still in tact? Or will they make a pigs ear of the returns process as well?

Watch this space!!!