Category: eCommerce

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.

Just before the weekend I ordered a few ‘door posters’ from AllPosters.com and I genuinely forgot I had ordered them. There was money sitting in my PayPal account, enough to cover the investment, so I placed the order and arrived home yesterday to find a note from An Post – failed delivery, collect tomorrow, foreign package (not from the UK).

Foreign package? Still hadn’t a clue.

So it was a genuine nice surprise to arrive at the post depot at 8:30 this morning, having witnessed the school bus in front of me skid sideways on the ice, to collect said posters.

Pay by paypal, speedy delivery from the US (4 days), and studio B is about to get decorated with door size posters from Trainspotting, The Godfather and Scarface.

How very “cribs” of me.

I was part of the affiliate program for AllPosters.com a few years back, when KKM first started but I can’t say that I’ve actually bought something from them until now. The swaying point? PayPal. When I got to the checkout I was thinking “wouldn’t it be great if they accepted PayPal”. Partly because I couldn’t remember where I left my wallet, but also because of the funds sitting in the account. Some online advertisers pay direct to the bank, some direct to PayPal and rather than put the transaction on my credit card, wait 7 days for a PayPal request to send money to my bank account (while losing a euro in process), I can purchase straight away.

AllPosters.com, I’ll be back.

If you see a decent price for a seat on a plane online, don’t wait around to make up your mind!!

Just booked flights to Amsterdam for myself and my brother, his girlfriend and a friend and, by my reckoning, because we waited until after just after midnight to make the booking, having started looking around on AerLingus.com about a half hour previous, the price of the seats went up by EUR30 each outbound and E25 each inbound.

Some pain in the arse!

Almost as bad as the nightclubs are these airlines!

Having ordered from Apple earlier in the week, my lovely ‘mighty mouse’ arrived today (post scheduled for the photo blog later). A pure gem. Been after a mouse for the laptop for ages and grabbed one from the Apple Store this week. Order went through on Monday, text message confirmation of shipping on Tuesday from the UK, arrival via courier after lunch today. Happy days and well worth the near-50 quid price tag I feel.

Brings to 2 the number of good shopping experiences this week (other was yesteday’s ease of purchasing a .ie and pushing through registration and site launch with Blacknight for TheatreCompany.ie – cheers to Michele and one Niamh Fitzpatrick).

I’ll give thumbs up today to Apple’s address verification in the Apple Store. I made my first purchase today from the store, picking up a new Apple mouse for the MacBook Pro. Why do I give thumbs up?

Well, when I put the office address down as the shipping address, they said they couldn’t verify the address and I had to enter another one. So I changed a detail or two around, still no joy, another problem verifying the address. Now, rather than be really stubborn and make me enter it again, the screen basically prompts “if you’re sure, then we’ll ship it here”. Presto, address accepted, the mouse is on it’s way. Why can’t other sites follow suit? Always hanging up on postal codes and zip codes and likes.

That and the fact that it took about three or four clicks from finding the mouse to finishing the order, I’d say it was a good shopping experience 🙂

RTE report this afternoon that proposed plans to allow the online sales of duty-free cigarettes and alcohol have been scrapped by the European Court of Justice. It would have been seen as a golden opportunity for Irish online shoppers (who would be smokers and drinkers) seen as the price of above items in Ireland is a tad on the ridiculous side.

The ruling is a blow to Europeans hoping to buy cheap alcohol abroad via the internet.

The Luxembourg-based court upheld the current interpretation of EU rules, which state that in order to benefit from cheaper taxes elsewhere, consumers have to travel to the EU country in question and pick up their purchases.

I’m not a smoker myself and while I certainly enjoy a large bottle on the bar at the weekend, paying €5.30 a go (in the cheaper pubs) is a bit outlandish, even if most of the stuff we get in Kilkenny is brewed here in the town.

Though, seen as the prices of flights continue to fall, you can likely pick up a flight for what would have been the cost of your shipping for heavier goods (beer) online…

What, you might ask, is regifting? Regifting, according to Wikipedia is “the act of taking a gift that has been received and giving it to somebody else in the guise of a new gift.” Many times has it been the subject of humour in TV and film (like Seinfeld, which I’ve finally started watching and ‘Old School’ with Will Ferrell which I caught on DVD lately) but I can’t say I would ever do it myself.

Not only that, but seemingly there’s certain etiquette about it as well

1. The primary rule is not to give a gift back to the person who gave it to you.
2. Similarly, regifting to someone who knows the original giver carries the risk of exposing both your lack of attachment to the gift, and your failure to select and purchase a new gift for the recipient.
3. One should remove any cards and other indicators that the gift was originally given to you.
4. Finally, using the gift before regifting it — so that it is no longer “new” — is generally considered inappropriate.

It is big around Christmas in relation to presents and certainly big in the US but starting to creep into Irish society a bit as well. So, Regiftable.com was established, to “help you get through the season with your budget and sanity intact”.

But, if that’s what you’re into – regifting – you can find all about it on Regifting.com, including reading some success stories and garnering a few tips on how to pull it off.

If you do regift – shame on you!

Just wondering, is there anywhere online that allows you to schedule when you would like an item to be shipped and charged for? I do an awful lot of shopping for musical equipment on Thomann which purchase invoices going to break silly figures after Christmas but they’ve recently improved their online customer centre and added in scheduled shipping and charging (they only charge when the item has left the country). Is there anywhere around, offhand, that does the same service for books and DVDs?

Last week I switched over to a postpay option through O2, picking myself up a Sony Ericsson K800 (very snazzy I might add, nice little RSS reader built in) but when I logged into the O2 site this morning I saw my bill had arrived already. Now, I’ve only had the phone around a week but was alerted to the fact that I’d be inserted into the next billing cycle, which happened to be the 8th of the month. I’m not in a gripe that the first bill was issued only a week after using the phone, but more a little curious as to how EASY it was to pay the bill.

A little too easy.

I’ve got a love hate relationship with the O2 website, especially since their changeover to the new version of the site. Logging in to check your account can be an absolute nightmare at the best of times but I reckon if someone got into your account then you could be looking at a nightmare yourself.

When I had the speakeasy option (which I’ve been using since my days in the secondary school) I used to top up at the pass machine or in the shop. Only a few weeks ago I made the move to register my credit card to top up the phone online, made sense, and I could use the online banking to put the money back on the credit card straight away.

But why O2, why do you make it so easy to do! Once you get past your username and password there is no more security. No random question, no asking for your DOB or few digits of your mobile number. I went online, saw the bill needed paying and pretty much within three clicks (to see the bill, click continue and click pay) the bill was paid and my credit card charged. I’m all for having things made easy online but does anyone feel thats a little TOO easy, in particular when your credit card details are already stored on the site? Could they not even ask you to reconfirm your password at that stage, just in case?

I like shopping with Play. Cheap and cheerful, speedy enough delivery and they offer a great returns/replacement service as well. I’ve had fun there in the last few weeks – namely three series of Black Books (with Bill Bailey, Dylan Moran), series one and two of Spaced and The Godfather trilogy (which I’ve enjoyed during my week off).

So I go to the site today and it looks like they’re offering posters and tshirts now as well. Low and behold – they don’t ship posters to Ireland!

Why??

So, those two Tool tickets I mentioned last week, have sold 🙂

Mind you, they didn’t sell the first time around on a 3-day listing so eBay kindly told me on Saturday that if I relisted them once and they sold they would refund the listing fees…. and they sold and I got the fees back.

No fleecing people on prices (face value + booking fee) and offered free registered mail – can’t stand most people’s postage prices on eBay!

Being someone who likes to shop and browse and AWFUL lot on eBay, it is quite easy to sell on it and I picked up the sale on a Buy It Now purchase, so to the customer – who happens to be from Waterford – my many thanks 🙂

Gracing my inbox this evening…

Dear Creative Customer,

Thank you for shopping at Creative On-line Store.
Your order has been shipped from our premises on the date indicated below:

14 June 2006

Delivery time may vary depending on the type of product and/or destination for shipping.

No apologies, no ‘sorry we lost your order the first time’, no explanation of the ‘problem with the stock’, no sign of being charged for it after 14 days of waiting (thought that could play in my favour, however unlikely that it stays that way). Last time I order anything from Creative online anyway…. Should send it back out of spite….

So, I’ve been looking for a soundcard for the PC at home and decided to pick myself up Creative’s Audigy 2 Platinum EX and low and behold on June 1st, some 11 days ago, I placed an order via Creative’s Online Store on eBay (which works out of Dublin).

It was bad enough that they don’t accept PayPal and you have to phone to complete your eBay order, but I let that one slide. So I place the order, wait a half hour and ring Creative in Dublin to process the payment. Wouldn’t you know it that in that timeframe they’ve lost my order, or just can’t find it, and I have to spend 20 minutes on the phone while they track it down, despite me quoting all my eBay details – member name, item name, product name and description etc.

Following the phone call I get my confirmation email along with my receipt of payment. This morning I check with the bank and wouldn’t you know it, there’s no charge made on my credit card. So I phone Dublin again this morning only to be told that there is a “problem with the stock”, “we will ship it tomorrow”, and I can “expect delivery within two weeks”. Would they not care to tell me this by mail or a courtesy phone call since they have all my details anyway!
In fairness. I’d likely walk to Dublin quicker, stop off for some food along the way, stroll into the Creative offices, pull an Audigy out of someone’s machine, and get back to Kilkenny in time for the end of the World Cup before I’d see this card.  Who said online ordering is easy?