We have a family of teenagers who like to subscribe to various partworks magazines, which are all distributed in Australia via Bissett Magazines. Titles like, Build the Millenium Falcon, 3D Create and Print, Marvel Universe Figurine Collection, and the Mrs gets various knitting and crochet magazines from them as well.
We subscribe via Bissett directly so we can get every issue along with the subscriber gifts and bonuses. Bissett likes to tell people waiting on the phone with them that they can get things done quicker by visiting their website and creating an account. What a complete and utter waste of time their online account services are though?
Apart from the site being hideously slow, it just doesn’t work. Going to the section that shows you all your subscriptions doesn’t actually show you all of your subscriptions. In fact it shows one of my subscriptions as listed twice.
Going to the section that shows you when your next shipment will be dispatched usually doesn’t have a date showing for any, and in the rare times that it does, the date for all issues dispatched is January 1 in the year 1867 or sometime similar.
Going to the section that shows your invoices and how much you owe and which dispatches you’ve paid for never actually give any information other than to say something’s either been paid or not paid, with at least four issues of each title being listed as paid long before they’ve been dispatched and long before we ever get charged for them.
Changing your details on the site to update postal addresses, etc, gives a confirmation message that the new address has gone through, but the details don’t actually change as far as the postal department is concerned. We end up having to phone up weeks later to find out what’s going on and then get told they still have the old address and don’t have the new address, even though the online account shows the new address only.
The lady who answers the phone always says the same thing, the website doesn’t work, yet they keep it running and tell people in recorded messages that they should consider using it instead of being left on hold.
Not a good way to run a business, but considering they hold the monopoly on partworks magazine distribution in Australia, there’s not a lot you can do if you want to get the magazines. Newsagents usually only stock the first few issues and then tell you to subscribe via Bissett for the rest of them.
Very frustrating, but what can you do? They don’t care that the website’s broken and never try to get it fixed. So what’s the point of having the online account service???
Rant over.