My Experience With Out ’n’ About: A Surprisingly Frustrating Journey for an Almost £1000 Order

I do not usually write posts like this but my recent experience with Out ’n’ About deserves a proper write up. When you spend close to a thousand pounds on a pushchair setup you expect the service to match the product. Instead I found myself dealing with delays, automated replies, split deliveries and very slow communication.

I work with supercomputers and parallel storage systems for a living so I am used to diagnosing complex failures, but I should not have to reverse engineer a basic retail order just to work out where my items are. It should not be this hard.

Here is exactly what happened.

The Order, 1 December

I placed order 35886 which included:

• Nipper V6 Front Rider × 1, 75 GBP
• Nipper Double V6 Plus Pushchair × 1, Summit Black, Newborn and Toddler Bundle, 925 GBP

Nothing was listed as a pre order and the delivery estimate stated five business days.

There were no updates and nothing was dispatched in that time. I could feel myself falling into my professional mindset, asking simple operational questions. Why is the SLA broken. Why is there no monitoring. Why am I the one detecting the failure event. A retailer should know when an order is late, should know what a customer has ordered and should know what has and has not been dispatched.

Chasing Begins, 11 December

With no communication at all I emailed support at 07:28 on 11 December.

“Order 35886 hasn’t been dispatched yet and I’ve not had a shipping notification. Please confirm the status and the expected delivery date.”

The Nipper Bot Replies

The bot replies were repetitive.

At 07:29 it confirmed the order had not been dispatched.
At 13:31 it repeated the same line.
At 13:47 it did so again.

Nothing explained why the order was stalled or when movement would occur. There was no recognition of the missed delivery window. As someone who works in high performance computing it was surreal to watch a support bot fail at the most basic conditional logic.

AI and technology should reduce friction. Here it just amplified it. The Nipper Bot added nothing beyond the same stock sentence. It was impossible to get anything useful without manually forcing escalation.

Eventually I wrote:

“Your commitment to repeating the same information without adding anything useful is genuinely impressive.”

I requested escalation to a human.

The bot replied:

“I will escalate your inquiry to the appropriate team.”

No human appeared.

What the Courier Was Doing While Out ’n’ About Repeated the Same Message

DPD was the only place showing real movement.

Their tracking showed:

• 11 December at 13:08 shipping details created
• 11 December at 21:26 parcel processed at DPD Birmingham
• 12 December at 05:44 parcel scanned in Gloucester

All of this took place only after I began chasing support. Out ’n’ About never notified me of any activity. There was no dispatch confirmation and the order still showed as unfulfilled in their system.

As someone used to coherent logging and distributed system visibility, this was baffling. If DPD knows exactly where my parcel is, why does the retailer not seem to know anything at all. Do they not have internal tracking. Do they not know what I ordered. Do they not know what has or has not been dispatched.

Two Deliveries and No Explanation

The order arrived in two separate deliveries. Out ’n’ About did not inform me of this, did not explain why and did not give a timeline for the remaining item. Everything I learned came from watching the courier logs.

Even once both deliveries had taken place the order was not complete and there was still no proactive information from the company about the remaining item.

Continued Silence

Despite several messages I still had not heard from a human.

I wrote:

“Still no reply.”

and

“No human response to date which is rather disappointing.”

This is the moment I said to myself, I work with systems that manage petabytes, clusters, failovers and scheduled jobs. I should not have to put up with this shit from a basic ecommerce workflow.

The First Human Email, 18 December 2025 at 09:28

The first human email arrived a full week after my initial message, on 18 December 2025 at 09:28.

Thabo wrote:

“Upon reviewing our records, we can confirm that your order 35886 was delivered and received by you on 12 December 2025 at 12:33.”

This addressed only part of the situation and did not acknowledge the second delivery.

They added:

“If there are any items still outstanding from your order or if you have any further questions please let us know.”

There was no apology, no explanation, no recognition of delays or mixed messages, no awareness of split deliveries and no sign they had reviewed whether the full order had been fulfilled.

It felt as though the matter was considered closed simply because something had arrived.

What This Experience Highlighted

Dispatch started only after I chased

The courier timestamps prove this.

AI support should help customers, not frustrate them

The Nipper Bot made everything worse.

Out ’n’ About did not send a dispatch email

I had to rely on DPD for all tracking data.

Human communication was extremely slow

A human response only came on 18 December.

The order arrived in two separate deliveries

Out ’n’ About provided no explanation.

The order was still incomplete at that point

There was no evidence that anyone checked what was missing.

Customers should never be reverse engineering a retailer’s process

Yet that is exactly what I found myself doing.

Final Thoughts

The Nipper pushchair has a strong reputation and I expected the buying experience to reflect that. Instead I encountered delays, silence, bot generated noise, contradictory information and incomplete fulfilment. It turned what should have been straightforward into a needlessly stressful process.

For anyone considering ordering from Out ’n’ About, I hope this timeline provides a realistic picture. If anything improves or changes, I will update this post.