Collect, return, get advice: everything you can do in our stores
Customer service doesn’t always have to happen over chat or on the phone. At our ten stores across Switzerland, you can collect orders, return items you didn’t mean to buy, bring in anything that’s broken and get in-person advice.
Did you know about all the services we offer at our stores? I’m currently doing an internship with our editorial team – and since I also work regularly at our St. Gallen store, I’m taking this opportunity to give you a behind-the-scenes look.
Source: Lucy Kingsman
Where to find us
We have Digitec stores in Bern, Basel, Zurich, Dietikon, St. Gallen and Kriens. In French-speaking Switzerland, you’ll find us in Geneva and Lausanne. Meanwhile, in Winterthur and Wohlen, we have our Galaxus stores. But it doesn’t matter whether the sign above the door says Digitec or Galaxus – we’re all one team and offer the same level of service everywhere.
Every store has a small showroom with a selection of products. The only exception is Winterthur, where we simply don’t have enough space for that in our location above the train station. Apart from that, the concept is the same everywhere. Only the range of products on display varies slightly from branch to branch.
Source: Christian Walker
What’s important to know is that we’re not a classic store. The showroom is there for browsing and trying things out – few products are in stock for immediate purchase. Our stores primarily serve as collection points and return locations. On top of that, we offer sales advice and services, like fitting custom screen protectors for smartphones and tablets, or setting up a new device and transferring your data from the old one.
Source: Lucy Kingsman
In-store order collection: handy if you’re never home during the day
Having parcels delivered to your home is convenient, but it’s not always the perfect solution. Sometimes you’re not in when the delivery arrives, or it simply doesn’t come fast enough. That’s exactly what in-store collection is for. When you order, you can choose your preferred store. We’ll then send the products there, and you can collect them whenever suits you.
Important: not every product can be delivered from our warehouse to one of the stores. As much as we’d like to offer collection as an option for every product, in certain cases it’s not possible for logistical, safety or organisational reasons.
Our items are typically stored in our main warehouse in Wohlen. As soon as you order a product to a store, it’s prepared for transfer and delivered to our branch by truck.
Source: Christian Walker
Depending on the store, deliveries from our warehouse arrive once or twice a day. If an item is in a different warehouse than the Wohlen one, or is shipped directly by one of our third-party suppliers, we can’t transport it to the store.
We also can’t deliver food or hazardous goods to our stores, as we can’t guarantee hygiene and safety standards during transfer and subsequent storage. We don’t want to poison or endanger you – or ourselves, for that matter.
We also don’t offer in-store collection for large and heavy items. Not because we’re lazy, but because of space constraints and the logistical complexity. And as much as we’d love to have a sofa in our store, you’d probably find it impractical to lug it home from there anyway.
That sounds like quite a few exclusions. But the vast majority of products can, in fact, be collected in-store. To see whether the product you’re looking at is one of them, click on the availability indicator, and it’ll tell you which delivery options are possible.
Source: Joel Brändle
Source: Joel Brändle
How in-store collection works
As soon as your order arrives to the store, you’ll get a notification by e-mail or text message. If your order contains several items that arrive at different times, you’ll get a separate collection invitation for each item.
From that point, we’ll hold your items for 14 days. If you don’t collect them within that time, your order will be cancelled automatically. That means the items will go back to the main warehouse, and you’ll get a refund if you’ve already paid. This rarely happens: only around 15 in 100 orders go uncollected within the 14 days.
For collection, you need to bring the order number from your collection invitation. If the order has already been paid for or bought on invoice, we’ll also ask you for ID. That may sound bureaucratic, but there’s a simple reason for it: it guarantees your order ends up with you, not with whoever reaches the counter first. You can have someone else collect your order for you. That person needs to be explicitly authorised, though. There are two ways to do this:
- You add them as an authorised person to the account used to place the order.
- You contact customer service and give us the full name of the person who’ll be collecting the order.
Source: Lucy Kingsman
Ordered the wrong product?
If you want to return an item, you have two options: send it back by post or return it at one of our stores. The second option saves you the postage.
If you opt to return it at one of our stores, it’s best to register the return accordingly in your customer account beforehand. You’ll then get a QR code to show us in the store. This system is convenient and efficient. From the day you receive the product, you have 30 days to return it with everything included and in its original packaging.
The same rule applies here: we can’t accept everything as a return. Food and hygiene products – lipsticks and razors, for example – are generally excluded for hygiene reasons.
For logistical reasons, we can’t accept in-store returns of large and heavy items or products from our third-party suppliers. But you don’t need to worry in those cases: we provide a paid return label, and you can drop the parcel off at your nearest post office.
What if something breaks?
You can also drop off faulty products in our stores. Here too, large and heavy products are excluded for logistical reasons. If something’s faulty, we take a quick look at the damage and then send the product on to one of our service centres. Depending on the product and the damage, repairs can take one to two weeks.
What we unfortunately can’t do: fix the problem on the spot, or lend you a replacement device while yours is being repaired. As much as we’d like to – we know defects never come at a good time. However, our store staff aren’t trained to carry out repairs, and we don’t have a proper workshop or spare-parts stock in our branches. Keeping a replacement device on hand for every possible fault would be beyond what our logistics can handle.
But we won’t leave you to deal with the problem alone. We’ll take in your device, look at the damage together with you and make sure it gets repaired in the right place. And if things get tight, we’ll work with you to find a stopgap solution.
Source: Lucy Kingsman
Sales advice: we know a lot, but not everything
We’re not trained specialists in every single product category in our range. That would be a tall order, given our range of over ten million products across 14 product categories.
What we do have is our own experience, plus everything we’ve picked up from countless customers’ feedback. A large part of our knowledge simply comes from our own hobbies. Bike tuning, PC building, photography, arts and crafts: as a team, we deliberately complement each other with our own areas of expertise.
Source: Lucy Kingsman
For example, I’m studying alongside my job and often advise customers on 2-in-1 laptops and lifestyle products for flatshare life. I have no idea when it comes to questions about RAM and motherboards, so I’ll point you towards another colleague who does instead. And if the whole team reaches its limits, we’re happy to dig deeper together with you rather than just tell you something we’re not sure of.
Our job in retail isn’t to sell as much as possible, but to give you the best possible advice and help work out what you actually need. That’s also why Digitec Galaxus deliberately doesn’t work with commission or specific sales targets in its stores. And if that extra research still isn’t enough, we can pass your questions on to our product experts, who’ll get in touch with you online.
Have you ever visited one of our stores, or is there something you’d like our in-store teams to do differently? Let us know in the comments.
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