Deal Extreme will not refund your money when you return items Hung Kom Hong Kong

I purchased an HDMI to HDMI/optical audio switcher from Deal Extreme. They sent me the wrong item. In order to return items to them, you have to take a picture of it and the envelope it is sent in and upload it to an e-mail, which I did. Even though they had a picture of the item that stated what the item was, they sent an e-mail back and asked me to describe the item, which I did.

After much e-mailing back and forth (I have copies of all the e-mails), Monica stated that they don't have the item in stock and they would refund my money if I found a way to ship it back to them. She promised to reimburse my shipping costs as well. UPS showed they received it on 1/5. I sent them copies of my receipts from UPS showing the date and cost of shipping. I e-mailed them 3 times from 1/9 and 1/31; they did not respond to any of these e-mails. I later found out by going to their website that they were gone from 1/24 -1/31 for the Chinese New Year, but there was no auto reply to my messages.

After waiting for a month, I finally contacted my credit card company and explained the situation. They were very helpful and stated that I would not be responsible for the purchase price. Only then did I receive an auto reply from Deal Extreme stating that they received a request to cancel the order. When I replied telling them what has been occurring, they replied that the item was shipped on 12/6 and do I have proof that I returned the item. They still have not refunded my money, although I am having the CC company deal with them on that. They also have not refunded the return shipping costs.

Deal Extreme is either staffed by totally incompetent personnel or they are a disreputable company. Either way, like Robert, my advice is don't do business with them. I wish I would have googled this company before doing business with them, there appear to be other complaints there as well.

Rich
Renton, Washington
U.S.A.