I’m sure that by the title you can guess that I’m extremely annoyed with the Nokia Online shop, and I am this way because of the incompetent people and payment system that Nokia have, so grab a coffee or tea and read on!

Ok, let me start at the beginning, about 4 weeks ago, my mother lost her phone, so thought, I’d just pick one up from the Nokia Online shop  rather then get it locally where I would have to unlock the phone and then have a phone which probably has loads of network rubbish on the hardware and/or software and this is where things went wrong very quickly.

I don’t know if you know, but in the past, Nokia had about 4-5 different parts of their site, including things like the forum, the main site, the shop, ovi, etc, and all of these different sections, had different login’s and passwords. Well Nokia recently decided that this is a bit silly and they should have a single sight on throughout the website, which in theory would be great and should have made like easier but I couldn’t be more wrong!

One of the main issues for me, was that I have logins for each of these places, but in every place, I had used different e-mail address’s as I set them each up at different times and the login for each of these sections would mostly be my e-mail which was simple enough but recently Nokia rolled out a single sign-on system which was logging in with a username so when I tried to log into the Nokia Shop with my e-mail, it just would not work.

The only places in Nokia that I had a username was on the forum and the ovi store where I used the same one, but everywhere else I logged in with my e-mail address, and as I’ve got several e-mails, they all are using different ones! Little did I know that this would come and bit me in the ass!

Since Nokia decided to start this single sign in, it makes remembering password earier BUT some of my accounts have just disappeared off the face of the earth and I cannot get them back as I found was the case with my Nokia Online Shop account, which I used to but a good 4-5 very high value phones like the N900 and X6-32GB just to name a couple, and I know I have an e-mail somewhere in the mine field of my inbox, but it was nice to know that I could just login and see the information there (and it came in useful once when I lost my phone and needed to make an insurance claim. But because that account was only being signed in with my e-mail I have now lost access to it, and without any sort of warning from Nokia that this might happen, which just makes it worse.

Ok not to the current part, I wanted to make an order on the Nokia site, and when I got to checkout, I noticed Nokia added an option to post to a different address, which I thought was perfect, I would send it to work as I never know what day’s I’ll be home, etc, but it failed with “card error”, so thought, maybe I entered something wrong, so tried with a couple of other ones, and still the same issue which was very strange and as it was late, I couldn’t call Nokia till the next day.

Now the next day I tried to use my card first thing in the morning to find that my £3.50 transaction was declines, and I know i have money in my account so I called the bank to find my debit and credit card was blocked because of Nokia, got that corrected and called Nokia to discover that Nokia do not allow different addresses, which is ridiculous, and on top of this, apparently, their system is set up so poorly that I have to wait 5 working days before I can try again. OK maybe this is some sort of security features, but common, what are they playing at?

I let 6 working days pass and try again, but it got declined, so I call up and this time they said they don’t know why it don’t works and it is going to be passed onto their “Higher Department” which in my opinion seem to be mythical people as after another 6 working day’s I try and still nothing, and these “Higher department people are still working on it.

On a side note: Nokia’s Customer service over the phone are completely useless at most things so don’t bother unless you have to! and if they say “I will call you back by the end f the day”, don’t expect to receive that call! I have spoken to them about 50-60 times in the past 3 years, of those been told I will be called by them by a set period of time, but even after day’s after they told me they will call, they don’t so I have to call back. Out of all these times I have only ever got 2 calls back and that was only after I’d called about 4 time in an hour because I didn’t hear anything in the first place!

Now about 3 weeks have passed, I am told to wait yet another week, and after the week is up, I am told that I cannot order yet. How incompetent can these people be that after 4 weeks of calls, and promises I still can’t order and all I am told is that they are waiting on the response from the “higher department”.

I am one seriously angry Nokia fan, I want the phone, and it’s like they are punishing me and I don’t know what I have done wrong. If it was anyone else, I’m sure they would have given up after the first try and that is why Nokia’s Market share, and profit’s have gone down, and if you don’t have people like me reviewing, using and practically promoting new products, how do they expect to ever get back up there?

I hope someone from Nokia looks are this and quite literally gives the people in the Online Shop team a good old kick in the rear because I want my N8!

UPDATE: 25/10/2010

Ok now 7 weeks after my first attempt at ordering off the Nokia website, I got a call from the Sales team and was told that I can now finally order! shame I had to get the N8 by giving the money to a mate and getting him to order it! but needed a phone for my mum and that went through just a few min ago (with 18% cashback through Quidco.com – UK only!) so all is good again!!!