Terrible, terrible, absolutely awful service from SonyStyle

Full Review
In December 2004 I placed an order from the Sony website. At the time they had a few rebates and an online coupon for additional savings. The computer was supposed to be shipped 2-day air.

After a week and no computer, I called Sony and was told it would ship soon. Another week passed, another call, it will ship soon. More time passed, and this time they told me they were going to cancel the order. They had the computer and the printer in stock but had a gray monitor instead of the black one ordered. You would think they could just ship the gray one instead of the black one but no, for some reason they would not make the substitution.

In the mean time, the new year had passed and for tax purposes, not shipping the order meant it would not be written off in the 2004 tax year. Since they wouldn't ship the order I had to go to a local store. Some of the rebates expired on December 31 so those were lost as was the online coupon so it cost a few hundred dollars more to get the same computer at a local store. The folks at Sony Online didn't seem to care, offered nothing in exchange for all the inconvenience, lost work (due to the delays) and extra cost incurred trying to deal with them. The Sony site has the absolute worst customer service of any e-commerce site I've ever dealt with and I would never, ever deal with them again.

The computer, an VGC-RA820G is great and the 19 inch XBrite monitor is great (except for a dead pixel). Sony makes great computer products but ordering from them online was a nightmare. Fortunately Sony computers have always worked flawlessly but if their post sales service is anything like the retail experience, it would be a good reason to look elsewhere.