Appliances Online Refund Involving a Gift Card (Not a Good Experience)

Wanted to share a recent experience I've had with AO. They've always been the cool kid and generally I've had a really good experience with them until recently. Bought a dryer directly on their website but then another deal came up on their ebay for a different dryer so I instantly cancelled the first one and placed the 2nd order, all happened within the same day.

When I placed the first order, I used a $100 AO gift card (redeemed with Virgin Money points), and paid the rest on CC. So after 3 days of not getting anything and I pretty much checked back everyday, each time a rep told me refund was already processed, eventually on the 4th try a rep looked into it and said they had processed it as a credit, not a refund. She then said she would process it as a refund for me. The next day the same rep called me and said they could only refund me the cash amount and I would basically lose the $100 gift card, they can't refund me that one. Not sure how junior this person is but she also said I would have to take it up with the platform where I redeemed the points from and try to get my points back. I was furious, I told her that's not how it works, I should get the refund back as a gift card, I can't just lose it. I also said I would take it up with Fair Trading if they can't give me a refund. Eventually she got a manager's approval to issue me a custom $100 coupon code. Another thing is she said they would issue back the refund to my bank account (asking for BSB, AC#) and not the original credit card. It's been 2 business days and still havent seen the money so I'm kinda having a bad feelings about this too, might have to chase them up again.

Not sure if there's anyone having had the same experience as I did, but AO has definitely lost some brownie points. I guess lesson learned for me here is that if you know you might have to get a refund on something, don't pay with gift cards. I unfortunately have too many gift cards that I have to use but I would rather pay everything on CC.