A couple of days ago, The Verge reported on a strange glitch that caused Sonos to ship customers more items than they ordered, and charge more. While most customers received between two and six additional speakers, we were recently contacted by a customer who has had a much more extreme experience. As a quick recap, this all came about after two users contacted The Verge about this issue earlier this week and pointed us to a Reddit thread with users having the same (or similar) experiences of ordering one or two speakers and receiving several in return. . In an email sent to customers (which you can read in full in our previous report linked above), Sonos attributed the issue to a system update that resulted in “some orders being processed multiple times” and customers being charged the rest. $15,000 worth of goods turned up in his apartment. But after purchasing a Sonos turntable, an Arc sound bar, an Arc wall mount, a speaker and a Roam speaker, one customer (who asked to remain anonymous) was met with a rush of shipments that effectively turned his apartment into a small Sonos store. Sonos has given him six of each item, which has resulted in about 30 different shipments showing up at his apartment building and about $15,000 worth of product. Like the other customers affected by the apparent glitch, he too will be charged for those additional items and told that he won’t see a full refund until he has returned everything. The customer said that he originally used a discount code to purchase the products, so he too will be charged a discounted price, but that still adds up to more than $6,000 in additional fees. Sonos has been telling users that it will provide free return labels and allow users to schedule a pickup with their carrier. But the customer we spoke with said that Sonos initially wanted him to print the prepaid labels and then take the truckload of unordered items to a local UPS store (which the company returned to after he refused). After Sonos sent a UPS carrier to his apartment building yesterday, the UPS worker didn’t realize the customer needed to pick up 30 packages, just picked up one box and then left.
The client is dropping off some shipments in the lobby of his apartment building. In addition to hurting his wallet, the client tells us that this whole ordeal is also hurting his relationship with his property managers. The client has received so many boxes that he can no longer place them in his apartment, so he has started leaving deliveries in the lobby of his apartment building. “They [the property managers] they are being patient but not happy with the boxes in the lobby,” the customer said. Fortunately, the deliveries have stopped, but he still has dozens of boxes left with nowhere to go. When he tried to contact Sonos customer service, he told us that he “reaches out to new reps daily” who promise he’ll get a call or update that never comes. Sonos has offered him nothing for the inconvenience of turning his apartment into a Sonos storage unit other than the “courtesy” of free shipping labels that were used to fix the problem he caused in the first place. Sonos declined to comment.
