If your first shopping experience with a new company is a good one, in my case, it’s enough to bring me back for more.
Such was the case yesterday with Turnkey, one of the leading European music technology suppliers. With a Digidesign Mbox 2 sitting in my cart on Thomann (Germany) since Thursday, yesterday was the time to buy. A quick scout around told me I could get the Mbox 2 that I wanted for 444 Euro. Not bad I thought, and their factory bundle (with additional plugins) was shipping at 577 Euro. I figured I could go without the factory bundle and spend the extra cash as needed on the plugins for ProTools.
So, I load up the cart, decide on the Mbox and a set of monitors, some cables I’ve been meaning to pick up and before checking out, give KKM’s sound engineer extraordinaire a ring to see if he’s any tips, having suggested one or two Focusrite units to me yesterday, pointing me in the direction of Turnkey.
So, I check them out at Turnkey and after humming and hawing for a while, decide to proceed with the Mbox 2. A quick scout on Turnkey (based in the UK) showed a discount on the Mbox 2 factory bundle – 577 Euro down to 466 Euro.
Sold.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Thomann and over the past few years have spent more money on that site than I care to think of but I was operating on a strict budget here and the more I could squeeze out of the budget, the better. So, I price-check the monitors – cheaper again on Turnkey. In go the credit card details, I press submit, and my payment is rejected “due to insufficient authentication”.
Rather than try and continue the payment again – just in case – I finally get to make a call from my Freetalk Office Dual Phone and get chatting to Colin at Turnkey, explaining what’s just happened online and that I would like to complete my order on the phone (knowing that all my details online are correct and my credit card is perfectly valid).
No problem he says, I read out my Turnkey shopping cart (Mbox 2 and monitors) but the monitors are out of stock and won’t be in until February 4th at the earliest. Knowing I’m still making a saving, I agree to the upsell of the next model up, in return for free shipping (at a saving of 30 euro). He explains a number of monitors, choices, and “what’s selling” to me, the transaction is completed and I go away happy, the phone order as smooth as the online order.
Ten minutes later I get a phone call from Turnkey saying they spotted I had a transaction declined due to a fault on their side, wanting to know if I was ok, did I want to proceed with the purchase, and explaining that they had recently changed their payment methods online (looked like a few teething problems) and apologised for the inconvenience.
“No worries” I said, “you gave a contact number for web sales on the site, I phoned them up and was sorted out in a few minutes”.
To the two lads at Turnkey, thanks very much, you’ve made a new customer for yourself, no doubt about that.
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