I bought a Thomson seatpost from CRC earlier this week using a £50 CRC voucher I was given last christmas. The CRC voucher system has always struck me as daft, rather than the voucher amount being deducted at checkout you have to leave a note with your order for someone to reimburse you after the full amount for items bought is taken from your account.

In the past the voucher amount paid back into the account has happened the same day as the deduction, occassionally it takes a bit longer but 3 days on I'm still waiting and CRC haven't replied to my email. The voucher is listed on the invoice and in my order history.

How long should I wait before getting worried?

eh?

I used CRC gift vouchers this august (2010) and the one before (2009) and both times i entered the code in at checkout and it was then deducted from the total before I paid.

It's never worked for me like that, unless they've changed things recently and I've not noticed (which might explain it). Perhaps I'd better send them another email.

Nope, found this in their FAQs, the same as it always was:-

Simply write your voucher reference into the Additional Notes field and your vouchers will be refunded once the order has been processed. Please note, when using this method your account shall be charged in full, once processed the voucher shall be refunded to your account. Refunds to credit cards can take up to 10 banking days to appear in your account

They are saying that it can take up to 10 days for the refund to appear, so maybe I shouldn't panic too soon.

Just been on to have a look what it was I did last time: (sorry no idea how to do that screen-grab thing to illsutrate)

-if you look at your basket, (you need 1 or more items in it at this point) then on the left side of the screen there is a big-ish button marked 'update quantity' and then immediately below this is a small box for text, and just above it is says: "If you have an eVoucher code, please enter it here" and then click the 'add' button just to the right of the text box. Then it knocks the value of your voucher off the total cost before you pay.

On my screen this is immedaitely above the 'additional notes' field that you put your code into: I wonder if this is different for different browsers? I'm using firefox fwiw.

That's obviously been added at some point and I'm still using the old method (which worked just a few weeks back). If the voucher hasn't gone through it's not a big problem, I'll just use it again and know how to do it properly this time.