I remember play.com before it was 
Rakuten’s Play.com I don’t remember it terribly well, and was really surprised to discover what a wide ranging site it now is. I remember it as just doing CDs and DVDs – it now does clothing, books, toys, tech stuff and pretty much everything (barring food) that you need for Christmas.
In fact, my biggest problem doing this review was being spoiled for choice – and spending a *very* long time browsing.
There’s free delivery on all items – even though it is in effect a marketplace and you’re buying from multiple traders. Meaning that when I placed my order I then got 9 order confirmation emails 😉 Many items have multiple listings and prices – I found that checking the delivery details carefully was an absolutely must, as sometimes the cheapest item was coming from abroad, and at this time of year, I didn’t want to build in any risks. There are also feedback ratings – I didn’t go below 97% in my retailer choices.
With four children to buy for, I explored most areas of the site I think. Annoyingly, some pages refused to let me pin – I’m not quite sure why – so my sneaky idea of doing a pinned wishlist for the grandparents fell by the wayside. Although I did manage to pin a few things and I may well go back and pin a few more.
This is going to make a certain young boy very happy. And me rather more relaxed about him carting his DS around!
And I might have finally found a solution for the iPad Mini. Isn’t this just wonderful?
I did my shopping with Superpoints – the loyalty scheme that they have. You earn a point per pound spent, and then spend them at one a penny. Every little helps, right? And given that there are things on the site starting at under a pound, every little is spendable. We all know how Christmas and birthday spending mounts up through the year, don’t we?
I found the navigation straightforward, and the searches good. Like I said, it was a time consuming exercise, but that was more me trying to find a wide range of odd things when I didn’t have much idea what I was looking for. Next year I’m setting the kids up on a wishlist site, and making the rest of the family tick things off! My only minor annoyance about the order process was that even though I was using superpoints, I still had to have an up to date credit card registered. (And that was only really a problem because I couldn’t find my purse 🙁 )
I will update on the delivery process when I get the goodies and let you all know how that turns out.
Edit.
Items have started to arrive. So far all have been exactly as described, one wasn’t very well packaged, but you can’t blame Rakuten’s play.com for that (you can leave feedback on individual merchants, I’ll be checking out what I can say.) Oh, and I managed to choose the wrong item for one (3DS XL v 3DS gah) so I’ll be thoroughly testing the return and exchange process as well :/
Disclosure: I was supplied with SuperPoints for the purposes of this review, and links above are affiliate links.
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