Dell Inspiron Shipping Delays…Still Frustrating Customers

Dell Inspiron Shipping Delays Dell’s having a difficult time keeping customers happy, with what appears to be near endless shipping delays on its Inspiron notebooks. Dell’s blaming delays on parts shortages and difficulty with the company’s new painting process. Sure, the new bright colors look pretty in its marketing materials, but picking a pink or green model can lead to some serious frustration.

Several hundred customers have sounded off on Dell’s Direct2Dell blog post on the subject, where some are saying their orders have been delayed by more than a month. Those who complain loudly enough have received up to $100 in rebates and expedited shipping. However, many Dell customers have had their Inspiron orders delayed multiple times and have had to send their children off to college without a notebook.

According to Lionel

To date, color options are the main source of delay on Inspiron notebooks. Basic colors like black are easier to produce. Premium colors and finishes like we use on the Inspiron models introduce complexity into the process, and that’s holding things up. Just as Alex mentioned in his post about colors on the M1330, producing smaller quantities is not the issueâ€â€Âit’s mainly an issue of scale. We’ll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks. Besides scale, we are also focused on maintaining the levels of quality we established when we designed these notebooks. In other words, we’re not going to relax our quality standards to ship more products.

If you’re waiting on an Inspiron and want to share your frustration, head over to Direct2Dell and leave a comment. There’s been more than a thousand comments posted so far.

Here’s what some Dell customers are saying:

Harry said:

Black isn’t any better. I ordered my black Inspiron 1520 on 8/14/07. Estimated ship date was 8/30/07. When I checked status a few days later, I saw a link indicating “Why is my order delayed?”.

This freaked me out, so I called Dell, and was assured that my order had not been delayed, and that the link was there just in case it did get delayed at some point (hmmm).

At 4:00 on the day it was supposed to ship, I got an email indicating that the ship date had been moved out to 9/14/07.

What really angers me is knowing that they knew all along that the order was going to be delayed, but waited til the last possible minute to tell me. They’re just stringing customers along trying not to lose orders.

This was supposed to be a computer for a college student. I have no choice, but to cancel my order. I’m purchasing an HP dv6563cl from Costco. My first non-Dell computer in over 10 years.

John N. said:

Well, I called again after my Sept. 5th ship date was AGAIN pushed back…this is the FIFTH push back to the ship date! I originally ordered a Spring Green 1520, 9 cell battery, webcam, etc, on July 17th! That’s Forty-Four days and counting!!! When I called customer service, I was told that there is already an “expedite” flag on the order…for all the good that seems to be doing. I asked them if I could expect the order to be filled this fiscal quarter! 🙂

Maybe Dell should outsource the painting process to these guys. They don’t seem to have any problem painting a Dell notebook black…

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