Recently I was pleased to get a letter telling me that I’d won the “readers tip” of the month, complete with a £30 voucher to buy some tools. I figured that I was onto a winner – who doesn’t love some free tools?

Unfortunately my experience of actually choosing and ordering the tools has been really pretty underwhelming. It all started with looking through the website; it’s slow, unresponsive, and often fails to load. The selection is relatively limited and prices a bit higher compared to many of the other places I’ve bought from in the past.

I checked the free postage limit and saw that it was £30: the same as my voucher. I put just over £30 worth of tools in the basket and headed to the checkout, expecting to pay the couple of quid that the voucher didn’t cover. The website subtracted the voucher value, then added a postage charge because I was under the limit.

Considering the previously mentioned dodgy website I sent an email asking if this was really the expected behaviour, figuring that it was probably a bug. This email has gone unanswered for almost a week, so I thought I’d phone to sort things out. The person who answered the phone simply told me that this was the expected behaviour and that he didn’t see an issue.

After a bit more fiddling with the order on the website I found that it’s impossible to use the gift voucher against the postage cost. The website also flatly rejects any attempt to use the voucher with less than its value in the basket. You can’t even ‘throw away’ any unused amount – you are forced to give them at least some cash for an order over the voucher value in addition to the postage!

In summary it was worth having as a freebie, but had a loved one spent money on this as a gift for me I’d feel aggrieved that they’d wasted their money. Obviously Chester have a business to run, and are free to choose their own terms, but these limitations and abnormal behaviours compared to gift vouchers I’ve encountered in the past do feel like they are operating in the murky grey area near the “bait and switch” line (but not technically over it).

If anyone has friends or relatives asking what they’d like for a birthday coming up, I wouldn’t recommend suggesting one of these gift vouchers unless these limitations are fine by you.

Mike