It was early December and we had friends coming in a few weeks to stay for Christmas. Ruth had told me that the table the TV was sitting on would be needed and that I needed to “sort it out”. Our friends have a small child, so there was no chance the TV was going on the floor or a low down table. That was when I hatched a plan; I’d buy a bracket and stick it on the wall.<\/p>\n
After a few days of looking around I had some idea of what I wanted. It had to be well made with a nice sized wall plate to spread the load, and it needed to allow the TV to be moved around and pulled out from the wall as required. I did some web searching and found a few suitable looking retailers, some recommended by AVForums<\/a>. I sent off some queries about dimensions, etc and awaited replies.<\/p>\n A couple of days passed and nothing. I was started to get a little frustrated. What sort of business model involves ignoring customers? Eventually, after some more searching, I came across the 123Brackets<\/a> website. The bracket I found was the A45SLV<\/a>, and it had all the dimensions listed on the product page. I had a few reservations about the site, but I figured not much could go wrong, it’s just a lump of metal. So I placed the order, feeling quite pleased that I’d managed to blag a free HDMI cable and next day delivery.<\/p>\n Two days later I hadn’t received anything. I fired off an email. Nothing. I fired off another email. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Eventually I got a reply saying there was a problem with my order and asking when was best to phone me. I replied with “now”. I waited. Nothing. I phoned them and explained the situation, but I was a little surprised when he said “which website?”. It turns out they have a few, including at least Brackets(R)Us<\/a>, which seems to be their main one.<\/p>\n Anyway, he explained how the bracket was out of stock, and that he’d send me a free upgrade to the next model up. Fair enough – I’d looked at the specs online and it seemed fine, albeit a little bit larger than I’d needed. Two days later a package arrived and I dived in. A few minutes later the frustration was kicking in again – it was the wrong bracket and didn’t fit my TV (it covered up all the connectors). What made it worse was the fact that I’d told them what TV I had, so there really was no excuse for getting it wrong.<\/p>\n I was now running short of time before Christmas, so I decided to go elsewhere. I ended up on eBay and found Intecbrackets<\/a> who sell a range of TV Brackets<\/a>. I found a suitable bracket and contacted them to confirm sizes. I got a very quick reply and decided to order. It arrived next day and fitted fine – in fact, it had a better wall plate than the original one. And to top it off, it was about half the price of the 123Brackets one.<\/p>\n So, to cut out the boring part of the story, that bracket went on the wall fine, although I did need to buy some new rawl plugs to get the bolts to fit snuggly in the wall. Everything looked good, and a month or so later the TV still hasn’t fallen off the wall \ud83d\ude42 .<\/p>\n This left me with the problem of what to do about the original bracket. I decided to send it back. It took me many emails before they finally agreed to accept it, and they sent me a returns form to fill in. I packaged it up securely with a completed form requesting a refund. Next was shipping – I decided to use Parcelforce<\/a> and found an handy offer on Hot UK Deals<\/a> that saved me a bit of money. I printed the label and then drove it up to the nearby depot. Sorted – I just had to wait for my refund.<\/p>\n A few weeks later I still had nothing. I dropped them a few emails with no success. Eventually I filled out their contact form and got a reply saying it would be sorted within a week. I waited two weeks and nothing. So I decided to write them a letter explaining the situation and asking again for a refund. It was my last attempt – next I would have been packaging up all the details and posting them off to my credit card company.<\/p>\n To my delight I received the refund the very day they received the letter. Finally it was all sorted.<\/p>\n I would like to point out that I don’t think 123Brackets are a bad company, I just think they’re badly organised. I expect when everything goes fine there’s nothing to worry about, but as soon as you get a problem you fall in to a process which just doesn’t work.<\/p>\n The moral of this story? Be careful who you purchase from, and follow you gut instinct if you think a site looks bad. But, more importantly, remember to check eBay!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How hard do you think it’d be to put a TV on a wall? Actually it’s quite straightforward, once you get hold of the bracket…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,64,61,62,60],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-123brackets","tag-bracketsrus","tag-ebay","tag-intecbrackets","tag-tv-bracket"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}