La Maison Shopping.

Review;
We heard about this company working in Normandy and was told that they were going to start delivering to Brittany, we thought we would give them a try, to be honest its been a bit of a nightmare, they tried hard, I believe they will get better.

There link, Maison Shopping

How it works;
You open an account with pretty much any retail business in the UK that delivers, Asda, Tesco, B&Q for example. La Maison direct will deliver anything from the UK, you could buy a complete kitchen or a set of tyres.
You open an account with La Maison shopping and get a delivery date to your area, and a time for delivery of any goods to them.
Do your shopping on line and pay for the goods by card with your retailer, give the retailer the address of La Maison shopping with your instructions as to what time to deliver.
(OK, this is where we started to get problems)
The goods were delivered to La Maison, unfortunately they were unable to give us a time or place to meet to collect the goods here in France, the company did say that they would get to a point central to all the customers, that the driver would let the customers know as soon as he arrived and we were told that the driver would not leave till everyone had collected there order. Not a perfect arrangement but this was the company's first visit to the area so acceptable.
My youngest son (Mike) agreed to stay in all day to be ready to collect the goods after they arrived in Rennes, in the afternoon he called me to say he still hadn't heard from La Maison, I phoned La Maison to be told the van had broken down, I do think they should have contacted me to explain rather than wait for me to call them, I did then receive an email telling me they had reduced the delivery cost after. But still no arrival time or delivery point, later that evening I telephoned them again, Mike needed to go out, they said it would now be the next morning, so I arranged for my Eldest (Dan) to do the collection, at 11.30am he still hadn't heard from them so again I telephoned, it would be the afternoon! We finally got the call, they were parked by the Brit Hotel in Rennes ( no they wasn't) Dan went to meet them, after driving to one of the two Brit hotels in Rennes the ( we discounted the 2nd as too far south and outside of the ring road) Dan phoned the driver, and got instructions that didn't make sense, opposite the Brit was a Renault garage, no there wasn't! He phoned me and I searched the internet. I found the the two Brit hotels, but searching the Google map I found a place called Brit Hotel Atalante Beaulieu, now it made sense, Dan found the hotel and the van and collected the goods, thankfully all done now.
Felling a little peckish, Dan went to a nearby Pizza place for lunch, sat at the table and ordered his pizza, then the phone rang, the driver couldn't start his van, flat battery, Dan being helpful and certainly wouldn't see someone struggle, had his pizza boxed and went to help the driver get his van started. He had time to eat the pizza in the car as the driver had to go and buy some jump leads.
When we originally asked Mike to collect the goods we did so because, A, he was off work, and B, he was coming to ours, driving past Dans on the Saturday morning, because Dan now had the goods they were now 65km away from our house so on the Saturday afternoon I had a 130km round trip to pick up our goods.
The order was short 1 jumper, which we have paid for, here lies a problem with Asda Direct, there is no way of contacting them by Email, I find it difficult to believe, but the only way of contacting them is via an 0845 number, which I can't dial in France, even if I could its 5p a minute,(EDIT I now have a phone number for Asda Direct, problem sorted, see bottom of post for contact info) reports I've read from other users on various forums is that you can take ages getting through, you can be put on hold, and that the service is less than useful.



Question, what would I score La Maison Direct? And would I use them again?

This was there first go at delivering to Brittany, although timings and place of delivery info would have been useful I can forgive them, now at least they have an idea of where they are going they can give us better information in future. But I was disappointed in the way they kept in contact with me, the customer, I phoned them so many times to get updates I felt I was becoming a nuisance. But I would add the lady I spoke to most times, Janine I think, was lovely to deal with. Dan says the driver as well very friendly.
Difficult to score, but sitting here eating crumpets with seriously strong Cheddar cheese does push there mark up, 3 Stars should and I'm sure will do better.

Will I use them again, I hope so, but as we all work its not ideal having unreliable delivery times. We would need someone else locally to order as well to be sure of being able to collect the goods. So the answer, Yes, but only if we can overcome the logistics.

One word of caution, as I posted earlier you cannot contact Asda Direct by Email, it seems (surprisingly) that Asda direct don't have the best of feed back . Click here for more information about what pcr-online has to say about Asda Direct.

Using this website saynoto0870.com I found a free phone number, I used Voipcheap to place the call, but I assume you could make it from a home number the number for Asda direct is 0500 100055 outside the UK that would be 0044 500 100055