The Gift List - John Lewis

AWFUL! DO NOT USE FOR A GIFT LIST! Our wedding guests have brought things off our gift list and they've not come off the gift list and their personalised message have not been in the packages so we have no idea who sent them and we get doubles! Called customer service and no help. Do not recommend

We setup a John Lewis Gift List for our wedding guests and have run into all sorts of problems. The worse part is that the customer service team are unable to help.

1) You are not notified when a guest purchases a gift, however, you then only have 7 days to pick it up in store. If you don't pick it up within those 7 working days your gift is cancelled.

2) If you try to extend the pick-up date of the order by calling the John Lewis customer service number, you'll be asked to provide the name of the wedding guest who bought you the present, email address, home address, mobile phone. However, if your wedding guest forgot to add their name under the message section there is no way to find out who gave the present. And you will not be allowed to make changes and therefore your gift is cancelled.

3) If your wedding guests does in fact leave their name and order number this is still not enough to change the order pick up date. You still need to provide all of the details provided under point two. In our situation, some wedding guests come with plus one's, so if you dont know the plus one's exact details (home address) you will have to call everyone and ask for all of the above.

At this point we have guests creating 'case numbers' to try to help with the whole process, but it's just spoiled the entire experience.

Avoid.

You really would think John Lewis would do wedding lists right. But no. I chose two items and for each I was asked to write a message which I did. Then when I went to check out it asked for another message. Also it would let me send the gifts to Mr and Mrs, I could only put one name. The gifts were also sent separately even though they were from the same list. And why do they presume you’re sending the gifts to yourself?? Then when they arrived, no names or message on either so had no idea who had sent it. Have your wedding list elsewhere.

We found the John Lewis Wedding List Service extremely poor: I question whether it is legal, it is certainly not ethical. And I see see we are not alone.

For my daughter’s wedding last year, many guests purchased gifts from an on line John Lewis Gift List, at that time John Lewis took their money and banked it and the gift givers and the bride and groom both received confirmation from John Lewis that items had been purchased for them.

However, on returning from honeymoon, they discovered a number of gifts were missing. When they phoned, John Lewis informed them that the missing items were no longer in stock, but they could collect gift vouchers to the value, from the store. Upsettingly, some items were parts of matching dinner service so they were left with an incomplete set.

It is not the Gift List policy to “pick items” at the stage of purchase and payment, nor mark them as out of stock. This allows John Lewis to keep selling and accepting money for items, whether they are able to fulfil their order or not. John Lewis told me that my daughter had been informed – but the email address they gave me was unrecognisable. As only gift vouchers are given in compensation John Lewis profits from the situation and the young couple loses out.

In John Lewis' explanatory letter they conceded that when someone purchases a gift item, they are not picked and put aside. Neither are "out of stock" items removed from sale or flagged, but the Gift List Service continues to sell and accept money for items in the (vague) hope that they will become in stock by the time the items are packed to send. In my daughter's case, John Lewis simply decided not to bother to restock the items that had been paid for.

The gift givers still believe that their gifts have been received by the young couple, for they were never notified or given an option to purchase the items elsewhere. Thank you’s had to be written for unreceived gifts, rather than risk upsetting guests. Why were the people buying the gifts and paying for them not notified? No doubt that is also in their small print somewhere – entirely for their own benefit.

When I wrote to the Managing Director, Ms Nickolds, I was expecting a reputable company like John Lewis to be concerned, and to have purchased the missing items for them, since they were still easily available elsewhere, I checked. But they declined to do so - instead pointing out the small print on the contract that my daughter and son in law had signed in the store - that allowed John Lewis to exchange any items for a gift card instead. This of course leaves John Lewis profiting from their unethical processes - at their customer’s expense. Eventually John Lewis gave my daughter and her husband cash equalling the sale value of the items – which was about a quarter of the price which they would have to pay elsewhere with their own money to obtain the missing items.

Given their numerous value statements, I was somewhat taken aback that John Lewis were also not interested in learning from our experience and making improvement to their service, to at least help future customers.

Shame on you John Lewis – in this instance, you have clearly failed to live up to your published key value statements:

“DO RIGHT: We act with integrity and use our judgement to do the right thing

ALL OR NOTHING: We put everything we have into everything we do

GIVE MORE THAN YOU TAKE: We put more in, so everyone gets more out”

I am left wondering how the decision makers in this case manage to sleep at night.

I do hope, at least, other engaged couples think VERY carefully before trusting John Lewis with gifts for the biggest day of their life and the setting up of their home together.

At the start we thought the John Lewis gift list was amazing, it was great fun to go around store and select items and then have them automatically uploaded to a list. They also gave the option of vouchers and charity donations as part of the list which we loved.

However it's the delivery that made this whole experience awful. We needed to get the gifts delivered to my husband's parent's house as our flat is tiny and we couldn't store them. We were only able to go to their house a couple of months later and we found that two items were missing. It's worth saying his parents are the sweetest most trustworthy people you could meet - you can imagine how they saw delivery as a massive responsibility and ensured everything went straight into secure storage off the delivery truck. However the two most expensive items on the list - a music player and a mini vacuum were missing. This was really distressing - our family and friends had clubbed together to buy these and they weren't there. It's was really upsetting to find.

We contacted John Lewis and they sent a series of emails that basically quoted back T&Cs at us and said they weren't going to do anything as we hadn't told them this within two weeks (never mind it was physically impossible for us to check within two weeks!) and they wouldn't do anything about it - even looking into. It's worth noting that when the gifts were delivered they were collated in a load of big boxes and several of these had been damaged or had tape that had clearly been opened & then closed again beforehand. My husband's mum had taken pictures of these in case anything had been damaged - but she'd never imagined anything would be missing in a million years - this was supposed to be John Lewis service after all!

I guess the last thing that was really upsetting was how they genuinely didn't care. Because it was out of their two week window they washed their hands of all responsibility and effectively told us “sorry, it’s your problem not ours". I really wish we hadn't gone with them - they pretend care about service but it's just marketing. I hate talking about this but I've promised to write this review in as many places as I can, as I don't think it's fair they can do things like this and still be seen as the best wedding list provider - it's just upsetting.

We went with John Lewis for our gift list as we thought they were a reputable company. We no longer think this. Nearly half of the items people bought for us were discontinued apparently this is suppose to be updated every 2 weeks. They only tell you which items people have already ordered and paid for are discontinued and not the remainder of your list. Although guests are charged and presume they have bought you a particular present items are not actually put aside for you until you pick a delivery date. We complained to customer sevice who took no notice and told us people would call us back at certain times and didn’t. The customer service is disjointed. I wish I had done a gift list with amazon at least I could have found items to replace the ones that were discontinued. I would not recommend jl gift list to anyone. Apart from over £300 in gift vouchers I now have to spend in jl I will never be shopping there again.

Despite some redeeming features, overall we were disappointed in the JL Gift List for our wedding (Spring 2017).

Given how popular/common JLGL was, we expected more. The start is fine, and you get a scanner for the store and some free cake in the JL cafe (free cake!), so if you like JL products then this part is good.

We wanted our honeymoon to be included as part of the GL so that people could donate to that if they preferred, and this was possible as we were going with Kuoni, JL's partners. This was thankfully possible, meaning we didn't need separate lists for items vs experience, although the website is clunky and you can't add more than 30 characters to describe your honeymoon request.

However, the "guide" sheet we were provided on how to use the GL was very amateur and of very poor quality (almost illegible photocopy, full of typos and not at all helpful); further, we found that for a number of items it wasn't possible to add to the GL (e.g. you cannot add any artwork) "in case it runs out of stock", despite the fact that they were only prints and we could see them in store months after the event, suggesting these had a low turnover / are replaced regardless... A number of normal items (e.g. irons) were also replaced with vouchers at a late stage, due to "changing suppliers".

There were further replacements / delays in getting some standard items which were "out of stock for GL", depite being in ample supply at JL. Whilst I understand that JL and GL are run separately from a corporate perspective, as a customer we don't expect to have to then do an online JL shop to buy the things that GL had run out of...

As a futher minor gripe - there's no way to identify who bought what without doing a manual cross-reference to the online list.

To end on a positive, we did end up with a whole bunch of fun things that were of the quality we expected, keeping this review up at 3 stars.

Very very disappointing!!!

Gifts not available so vouchers issued a day before delivery!

Items delivered unwrapped so imagine toaster boxes, pans in polythene bags rather than beautifully wrapped gifts! No messages attached to individual items so need to cross reference all items with the online list. They make such a fuss about recieving it all together and the excitement but after the joy of a wedding and the post wedding blues this has only added to our upset. Beyond disappointed and not what I expected for a company that promotes quality and attention to detail! I would not recommend this service to anyone!!!! Even Amazon wrap their gifts! Xxx

We decided on John Lewis for our wedding list, at first everything seemed fine. The only issue we didn't like was how guests couldn't select gifts to be sent to them but rather you could only purchase online and assume gifts would be sent on to the bride and groom... unfortunately this is where the problem then lies.

Arranging delivery for our items seemed easy enough, I was able to select my home address and select a day - our wedding was 2nd June 2017 but items couldn't be delivered until Friday 30th June - a little odd I thought but I didn't query it. I had no annual leave left so I got my mum to take a day off work on Friday 30th June so she could sit in our house and wait on the delivery - late evening and still no delivery - nothing, no calls. I'd already rang John Lewis and questioned if the delivery driver would call before delivery but I was told no.. I rang John Lewis on the Friday evening and was told I'd actually been given incorrect information and my delivery was booked but might arrive on the Saturday instead but more likely on the Monday, I was furious as I'd got my mum to take a day off to await this delivery. So here we are on the Tuesday and there is still absolutely no mention of my delivery, no cards through the door- nothing! Not only has delivery been a joke but a guest had bought us vouchers - John Lewis didn't contact me to say these wouldn't be included in my order, instead they only informed me of this when I contacted them about something different. similarly an item was out of stock on the list but someone had purchased it, this then had to be ordered from a different stockist website and sent separately. . . to date I have received absolutely no items from John Lewis. Beyond disappointed with this service, wish I had never ever used them for a wedding list.

I used to be a really loyal John Lewis customer but these people are a joke.

You can't use vouchers to pay for additional items on the list.

It took 3 hours in store to arrange a delivery for your items.

On delivery day, they cancelled mid morning as they hadn't got the items together.

And according to our guests it takes around half an hour in store to make a purchase from the list.

Utter shambles.