The Financial Ombudsman Service is one of the few UK organizations that is anyway effective. If only all other regulatory authorities were half as good?
One problem I have found with some UK eCommerce sites though is that their payment gateways are often broken with Brave/Chrome and the paypal payment option is an easy way of bypassing this issue.
The FOS seems effective to consumers because it levies a £750 charge to the financial institution for each case it investigates. It is often cheaper to do whatever the customer wants, whether or not the complaint is justified.
The financial institutions at the receiving end of FOS decisions don't necessarily regard it as effective. Claims management companies, for instance, can flood banks with very many dubious claims, with the FOS as effectively the enforcer.
My state (New York) has a similar regulatory feature. I had an issue with bees inside of the utility pole that feeds my home. Issue: the pole is owned by the telephone company. So power people tell me to call the phone company, and the phone company tells me to get a landline before they will talk to me.
So I called the public utility commission, which apparently starts fining both parties within 48 hours of the complaint, which I submitted on Sunday. Monday morning arrives, and there is a comical gathering of trucks with crews frantically working to replace the pole (which is a fascinating process).
The foreman told me that the government is essentially level 3 support, and had I worked through the company, he probably would have inspected it over a few months before any work would have started, and only if I was persistent.
The key lesson is that large companies only perceive pain. PayPal lives in a big loophole, so it’s difficult to inflict pain on them and thus difficult to ever be satisfied with them.
I once put the word "complaint" on the top of a letter to a UK bank who had made a mistake on a statement. It made all the difference. What had previously been dismissed as unimportant was addressed and they sent me £100 compensation.
Just taking that first step towards the Financial Ombudsman was enough.
It's a bit "one weird trick", but you're right that absolutely the best way to get consumer problems addressed in the UK is to use the word "complaint". It starts the clock as complaints typically have to be addressed within certain time limits.
If you don't use the word complaint then companies can argue that they thought you were merely providing feedback or engaging in something other than a complaint.
As soon as you use the word complaint, they can't argue that and it puts you on track to escalate to the ombudsman and the companies know it, and they know you know it.
One problem I have found with some UK eCommerce sites though is that their payment gateways are often broken with Brave/Chrome and the paypal payment option is an easy way of bypassing this issue.