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Simple shopper's confusion of complicated shoppinh world - posted at 2011-08-22 16:00 - Show Details
When I first discovered the great world of online shopping a few years ago, I was truly amazed. You know, the possibilities and comfort of the worldwide shopping presented the false hope that from now on, I would be able to get anything from anywhere. But the more and more I am getting into it these days, the more anger arises in me. I am going to describe you some difficulties I encountered lately showing disrespect of shops and "behind the scene" rules thanks to which you feel defenceless and desperate. The same way you feel in large chain stores when you look for advice or something specific, but it is just opposite problem. In chain store you find no info and not things you want, but what you find you can buy. On e-shop, you find anything, but come to point you just are not allowed to buy it.Example 1: Blizzard and battle.net
There is a thing, "Authentificator" which helps to protect your account, just a small keychain or mobile phone application. Well, cool, I wanted to get one. For mobile version, I looked on it, but my mobile is not supported (Nokia E75). So I wanted to buy keychain version, 9.95 Euro, free slow shipping. I put it into the cart, checkout and ERROR came in: "We currently cannot ship to this address." I ordered for Czech Republic. I clecked for a while and found out that I would have to order other item and pay 25 Euro shipping to get it. I contacted support and I received following answer: The reason you get this error is that Authenticators, when ordered by themselves, are shipped using normal postal mail. All other orders however are shipped using UPS. This is to keep the costs of Authenticator deliveries to a minimum, as the delivery costs would otherwise exceed the price of the device itself.
Delivery by mail is unfortunately not an option for all countries, including the Czech Republic. The country list does not currently reflect this as it only lists the countries to which we can ship using UPS. This can cause some confusion and we duly apologise for that!
As mail deliveries to Czech Republic are not possible, you can only order an Authenticator there if it is combined with another product, as you mentioned, as then the delivery will be handled by UPS. Using UPS for only an Authenticator delivery is not possible at this time however.
Summary: I cannot buy it, because post is not available for CZ !!! and they are terribly sorry, but did nothing about it - 1 month later, no correction.
Example 2: Barns and Noble
The HP fire sale of their HP Touch Pad started madness, shops dropped prices from 400 USD/GBP/EUR to 100 USD, but in US and Canada only. In CZ, it is offered for 20000 CZK, an outrage. So I said, well, Barns and Noble has worldwide shipping, and new toy would be fine. So I try to checkout and see: "In compliance with shipping regulations, some item(s) in your order cannot be sent to Prague in Czech Republic. Please provide another address below or edit your shopping bag to remove the following item(s):
HP TouchPad Tablet with 16GB Memory, WiFi 1.2GHz - Black".
No explanation anywhere why, nothing.
Summary: You want to buy an item offered internationally, but you cannot have it sent internationally.
So want is the conlucion ? There is a total disregard and disrespect, especially for US shops for smaller regions. They ignore that there are workarounds for this which bypass their cool limitations. They are simply not going to put even smallest intension to make things simpler for the customers. And this is a reason why western world shops are loosing with the China etc. Asian shops are doing they best to sell anything to anybody, they provide solutions for problems and they do not put different prices for different regions.
And what can we do ? We can fight back the simplest way for the customer - USE EVERY customer right we have, bombard support, request explanation.
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