Until 2 months ago I lived in an Amazon world. I thought the only decent ereaders came from them and was happy in my little closed world. Then I started reading the GoodEReader blog. Kobo ereaders looked like a must have to me. I'm good with Calibre so I didn't worry about switching ecosystems. On the 22nd of December I placed an order through Kobo for the Aura. They pre-auth. the charge from my account and sent me an email saying the received my order. On the 23rd I saw the order wasn't showing up in my account and emailed them. On the 24th they told me that they were having trouble with some orders not going through and that I should place the order again from a different computer. I waited and made sure that the pre-auth. dropped off(it did.) I got some extra money for christmas and decided I would use the extra money to get the H2O instead. On the 29th I ordered the H2O from Kobo. Order went through and this time it was an actual charge not a pre-auth. I emailed them on the 31st and asked for a tracking number. On the 2nd of Jan. I still had not received a response about my tracking number so I called them. They told me my order was still processing. I've been spoiled by Amazon I guess but I thought that 5 days(4days if you subtract the holiday) was plenty of time for them to have shipped the device since the promptly took my $179. I told them to cancel my order. The lady put me on hold and then told me that my order would be at my house on Wed the 7th and that by the end of the day she would email me a tracking number. On the 5th I had still not received a tracking number so I called again. They told me that the order was still processing and had not shipped. I told them that they have had my money for 8 days now and now they can cancel my order. I was really tempted at this point to just go to best buy and get the Voyage. Then I found out about Chapters. On the 6th I ordered an H2O from chapters. Got an email on the 7th saying it had been shipped. I emailed them for a tracking number. 4 hours later they sent me one. It says my unit will be here tomorrow the 9th. Wish I would have known about them earlier. Plus, with shipping my total at chapters came to $196 but when this was converted to US$ it was actually only $167, $12 cheaper than Kobo. By the way, I live in Nebraska.
Kobo doesn't make sense to me. They are a large company that is trying to be competitive. They make some excellent ereaders from what I can tell. How is there customer service this bad? It shouldn't be this hard to purchase one of their devices.