I know they're an established and trusted seller, but ultimately this is a lot of money to spend on an item - and knowing in advance that getting in touch with them is problematic, regardless of the time of year, the weather etc, is just a red flag to me. I'm all in favour of buying online, but having a potential customer on hold to the point that they give up - that's shoddy. That's the service given to the OP when he was considering handing them a load of money for a product. What will the service be like once they have his money, and he is sitting at home waiting for a delayed delivery, or trying to arrange a replacement for a faulty item?
Established and well-reputed maybe, but so far this transaction is making the guy's balls ache - why go further down that path?
Yes but he is trying to order an item when everyone has basically shut up shop for what is the biggest public holiday of the year.
As I already said once, Amazon is likely to have a ridiculous level of calls volume right now as they will have thousands of people calling up to find out whether the presents they ordered were going to be delivered today.
Although I don't know the figures, I'd argue that they probably have their highest volumes of calls ever right now with the way the weather has been.
On another note, would many smaller retailers be any different?
You either would struggle to get through or they would have gone home.
At the end of the day he is trying to order an item (which they have given a rough estimate of out of stock for sometime) at what is traditionally now past the end of trading on a major public holiday. Maybe just wait until Xmas is over, it's not like he is going to get anytime soon. Even if they had stock, do you really think it would be picked for dispatch and posted tomorrow....