We live in Portugal and we are renovating a large house that used to be a boutique hotel. We originally ordered 2 baths from Splash Direct who delivered the baths to our UK shipping company who then shipped the baths down to Portugal with no problem. We would have liked to have done business with Splash Direct again but they have since gone bust and been taken over by another company who have about 4 baths on their website and the rest are out of stock until 31/12/2015. We could not wait that long. We have 2 more bathrooms to finish so we went to Plumbworld, we paid for a bath over the August bank holiday weekend and gave our shipping address as in the UK and I contacted them on the tuesday to say that we wanted the bath sent to Algarve removals who would be shipping it down to Portugal. On tuesday afternoon they wrote back and said that bath was out of stock and that the money we had paid instantly would not be sent back to our bank account until 5-7 working days!!! So then I went onto the BathEmpire website and contacted them to ask if they would be willing to ship to a UK shipping company and after 45 minutes of waiting around on their live chat an answer finally came from the manager, that yes that would be fine we could go ahead with our order for two baths. I went back to my shopping basket and proceeded to order the two baths, but then there was a fault with their website and unbeknownst to me because I never got that far it wouldn't allow me to put in a billing address outside of the UK but i didn't know why, so when it said some problem with the gateway i just said ok to the little box and tried again...little did i know that they had taken not one but two payments from me a total of £1,400 quid!!! But no confirmation of the order and of course they had my money but instead of 2 baths I had paid for 4 baths and but i wouldn't be getting any baths because the order had not been finished. So i contacted their live chat and they said oh no we don't have your money...so i contacted our UK bank and they said yes they do have your money, their system had taken our money but would not let us finish ordering the baths. So now we have £1400 quid sitting in their account waiting for us to finish an order that we cant finish because their website is cocked up!!! On top of that we cant access that money for 12 days!!!!! So we had over £1800.00 quid sitting in other peoples bank accounts and still no baths!! I am totally appalled that companies expect you to pay upfront for an item but when they cant fulfill the order they expect you to wait to get your money back!!!!! Its not like I am asking them to ship to Portugal I am asking them to ship to a UK address, its not like we don't live in a global market where my money is as good as anyone else's in the UK bearing in mind my bank is HSBC and I have been banking with them for over 30 years!!!!