JOURNALIST Alfred Siew recounts his stressful experience with a concierge earlier this year:

'I WAS an hour away from stomping to the small claims tribunal when the phone rang.
The caller was a contact from Comgateway, the company I engaged to forward my online purchases from the United States.

The woman on the line, a director whose number I had got from a colleague, said she would help get my refund soonest and she apologised for the poor service. Let's call her Ms Gan.

Her recovery efforts ended a long saga that began with my first online shopping trip on US stores in late May.

Well, actually, it was my wife who bought her creams and other cosmetics from Drugstore.com, a popular online store based in Washington state and with quarterly net sales of over US$120 million (S$170 million).

I told her that I had signed up for a new account with Comgateway, a local freight forwarder which directs the stuff that residents here buy from overseas stores to wherever you live on this little island - be it Ang Mo Kio or Zion Road.

My problems began when I received just one of the dozen or so items that my wife ordered.

I realised from Drugstore.com that it had shipped the items separately, so Comgateway did not send the rest of the items to me.

After several e-mail messages to the freight forwarder, I found that my items were never going to be delivered - they were likely lost somewhere in a US warehouse run by Comgateway.

If that was not bad enough, the company did not have any phone number that I could contact them on.

There was only a Web chat service, staffed by people who could not tell you where your items were or when they would find them.

My patience ran out after several unanswered e-mail messages and hopeless online chats, manned by operators who refused to give me a contact person or phone number.

One chat operator even said its phones were meant for internal use only.

I got a business address only after I threatened to sue the company for losing my items.

Even then, it took more than a month to declare my items lost. After that, Comgateway's finance department forgot to send its refund cheque until I called up my colleague's contact.

Until the helpful Ms Gan sent a refund cheque and even reversed the delivery charge, I was heading to the small claims court.

By then, it had been two months since I ordered my stuff and there was no clear answer on where the items were or when I would be refunded.

If this was not a company but someone who organised a mass order, or spree, on an online forum, the person might have been reported to the police.

The moral of the lesson: Don't take freight forwarders at face value. Comgateway came recommended by my credit card company DBS, but it fell short of the service expected.

To be fair, some friends who have used Comgateway are happy with it. I also never thought it was out to cheat me of my money but its service had to be better.

The experience prompted me to open an account with a more reliable freight forwarder, Access USA (www.myus.com), which costs more but has been sending me my Blu-ray discs and computer gadgets on time.

More importantly, it replies to e-mail queries promptly and has a business address printed clearly on its website.'

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 3 September 2008.

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