Dealing with delivery disasters

The furniture store promised to deliver a new couch in six weeks. Five months later, you're still sitting on bean bags.

Whether what you ordered is awfully late, the absolutely wrong color, or it just won't fit in the door, there are strategies you can use to reduce the sting of a delivery snafu.

And if it's the deliverer that's at fault, like the overnight-shipping firm that lost an Iowa woman's engagement ring, you have some options, too.

Call to complain
Step one in a delivery disaster is to speak up -- and soon. Sharrone Moustakis, of Chicago, got her money back with good old-fashioned, persistent complaining.

"I ordered a sofa and a loveseat at first from a small store in Chicago," says Moustakis. "My mom arranged to be here for the delivery, and when it didn't arrive, she called up and said, 'Where's our sofa?' And they told her that they sold our sofa."

Moustakis didn't get an acceptable compensation offer after a mere phone call.

"My mom did a bunch of complaining," she says. "We threatened with complaints to the Better Business Bureau and they gave us our money back."

Negotiate, and then negotiate again
Kristen Wilson, of Westfield, N.J., also waiting for furniture, saved some money through repeated requests -- and a polite attitude.

"Fourteen weeks into our wait, I find out that the sofa hasn't even been started yet because the manufacturer is still waiting for the mill to make the fabric," Wilson says. "We're told that the sofa won't be ready for several more weeks, but that we could have the chairs and ottoman delivered."

The chairs and ottoman then became bargaining chips.

"I declined to have the chairs and ottomans delivered because I felt I would have more leverage on the couch if I hadn't already accepted the other pieces of the order," Wilson says.

"I said that if things weren't resolved to our satisfaction that we were canceling the entire order -- sofa, chairs, ottoman, rug, the whole thing.

"I figured the company wouldn't be happy about that because they already had the custom chairs and ottoman made for us. So the decorator said she'd speak to the district manager or whomever and see what she could do."

It turned out there was some wiggle room.

"She called back with an offer to credit me $200 toward the balance remaining on my furniture order." Wilson pushed a little. "She said she'd see if she could do any better and called back and said the absolute best she could do was $250."

Staying calm was crucial, she says. "Even though I was really mad, I was never rude to the decorator.

"The other thing I'm glad I did was hold off on accepting delivery of the other pieces. I felt like once they were in my home I had no leverage to return them if the sofa never showed up."

Use your credit card as leverage
If the company that you ordered from won't give you the time of day, or if their offer is paltry, try the credit card you bought the couch with, says Scott Bilker of DebtSmart.com, who is also the author of "Talk Your Way Out of Credit Card Debt."

"You can dispute everything you buy on a credit card," says Bilker. "Just return it, and make sure you have all the paperwork.

"You want to do this as fast as you can. The faster you do it, the higher the probability of success. Sometimes there are 60-day limits on one company vs. another."

Bilker says you can expect a pleasant conversation with your card issuer when you call to whine about a merchant who hasn't delivered what was promised.

"They're all going to be pretty nice when you call," he says. "They will always say, here's the paperwork. They will then take the money from the merchant.

"It's a $30 fee, sometimes a $35 fee, for the merchant when this happens."

So your credit card company makes money when you complain.

"And plus, when this happens too often, the merchant's right to take credit cards can be taken away," Bilker adds. "That's why there are phone numbers on your credit card statement, so the consumer can check that it's the right merchant before complaining to the card company."

In order to use your card company as your ally, you must be organized, Bilker says.