Posted July 23, 2016
mk47at: That sounds like fun. Not.
I've never manged to buy anything over there. The last time I tried, they claimed that it should be possible to purchase a bundle without an account. It didn't work, although I tried different email addresses. I even contacted their support, which was not that helpful. Apparently that error should only have occured if too many bundles were bought from the same address.
So it's no loss for me.
I bought a bundle there before and couldn't download it because they had a hard disk failure that destroyed data. Apparently a business selling video games to millions of people is ran in a rinky-dink fashion off of someone's laptop in their bedroom closet rather than by using sensible business practices. Seemed like they had never heard of RAID or backups or common industry practice for protecting their digital assets as the files were not recovered for like 4 months or more. When I contacted them about access to my files they just told me they had a hard drive failure and were working on it and were very rude with me. After a second rude interaction with them I told them I'd never shop there again over the issue and they verbally told me they'd give me a refund for my trouble then proceeded to not give me a refund and never responded to my inquiries afterword. I've never manged to buy anything over there. The last time I tried, they claimed that it should be possible to purchase a bundle without an account. It didn't work, although I tried different email addresses. I even contacted their support, which was not that helpful. Apparently that error should only have occured if too many bundles were bought from the same address.
So it's no loss for me.
I'm sure that other people have shopped there before that incident or after it and never experienced something like that, and I'm sure many people have either never used their customer support or may have had a different experience with them that was better than what I personally experienced. However, I experienced what I experienced and I put Groupees on my "never shop there" list after that. I'm a pretty rational consumer when it comes to customer service in that I realize businesses can goof up sometimes or have a sour employee that is not doing their job and might have an attitude or take actions that are in violation of a company's policies, and so even when I do have a bad experience somewhere I let a company know how I feel about the situation and what reasonable course of action I'd like them to do to fix the problem and set everything straight. If a company takes a reasonable recourse and fixes the problem situation for me and does so in a courteous manner that I consider good customer service, then I generally forgive them for the mishap/problem chalking it off to be a one-off inadvertent event and give them a break. If they not only don't fix the problem and give good communication and customer service however, then they will further erode or destroy my trust in them and most likely end up on my "poor customer service, incompetent and/or shady business, avoid" list - which is where Groupees has sat for the last few years.
As said above, I'm almost certain some people reading this will be lining up to say "I've never had that problem with them, I've had great experiences buying bundles there", and if that's the case for some people then that's great, but it doesn't negate my own personal experiences with them so I recommend people be wary and do their own googling around for reviews of the site and problems others have had as well. It's likely a case where if nothing goes wrong or someone doesn't need support then they have a good experience, but if something does go wrong or they need support they're treated like crap. Definitely has been my experience anyway.
Recommendation: Avoid them, not worth it. I've read also that they auto-reuse Steam keys if you don't redeem them right away, then tell you you're out of luck after.