Finally I have the refund from Elite Gadgets. It landed back on my credit card today – a week after I requested it.

Yay! I’ve got my new camera. I ordered it on Monday from www.ukdigital.co.uk, it was dispatched Tuesday and arrived today. I’ve not yet figured out how to use it properly, or even if my PC is capable of editing the footage but I shall post a review in a few days when it’s had a good test run.

And no sign of the refund from Elite Gadgets hitting my credit card yet, but I’ll post an update on here as soon as I get my money back… so to those interested parties who have mailed me about their extremely similar experiences of this company you shall know almost as soon as I do.

I called up Elite Gadgets this morning to find out what was going on. Craig assured me the camera had been sent on Friday and he would email me my tracking reference in the next 10 minutes. An hour passed and no email, so I called up once more. This time Craig gave me a tracking reference for City Link advising me that for some reason it didn’t work on City Link’s tracking service and he’d seen this before when the package had been lost. He was liaising with City Link to find out what had happened.

So I called City Link myself and confirmed that there were no deliveries on their system for my post code, in fact there had been no deliveries since March.

So I called Craig back again, this time advising him what I’d done and asking for a refund – which was actioned straight away. He tells me that the money will be back on my card by tomorrow.

I find this whole thing strange as I can’t come up with a scenario in which Elite Gadgets haven’t told me porkies. If I take their story at face value, then the courier is at fault which I find very strange because the consignment numbers are automatically generated when a job is created, so the number would be on the system. If the number was wrong then my post code at least would have flagged up. So I can only assume that Elite Gadgets either (1) didn’t have stock and were trying to delay things as long as possible so made up a consignment number / lost in post excuse in the hope stock would arrive quickly or (2) forgot to post the camera out of Friday and didn’t want to seem disorganised so quickly booked a pick-up of the package with the courier in order to give me a reference number, which hasn’t replicated to the courier’s main systems yet. But I’m just guessing and will have to find another supplier. Elite Gadgets = massive fail.

It’s well past 5 o’clock now and I’ve had no email about the dispatch of my camera, and my order status on www.elitegadgets.com hasn’t been updated either (still saying payment received). Never mind…

I called up Elite Gadgets earlier to find out whether or not I’ll be getting my camera any time soon and I’ve been assured that they have received stock of the HDC-TM700 from Panasonic today and my camcorder will be dispatched this afternoon and will arrive on Monday. I await my dispatch confirmation email with tracking reference number…