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Here's a concrete example that shows none of the above are true. I was buying some CDs to give as Christmas presents. I figured I would buy on the Internet and try to avoid the big music publishers (especially after Sony's little rootkit fiasco, sensible shoppers would never be touching a Sony CD ever ever again, I want to support someone with some respect for their customers). So here are two online CD suppliers that we can compare:
| CD Baby | Based in USA |
| Wolfmother Store | A virtual front for modularpeople.com, based in Darlinghurst Australia |
Both of them are small publishers, up against the big guns of the music publishing industry. Both of them are getting leverage from the new technology of internet shopping to reach a worldwide market. So far so similar... these are exactly the type of people I want to support.
I put three orders through CD Baby, and found that their typical order turnaround, from placing the order to getting the gear (that's transport all the was from the USA to Australia) is a bit less than two weeks. I placed one order on 2005-12-09 (quite close to Christmas)... I immediately get back a confirmation email (with the entire order listed in the email including order-number, prices, shipping address, etc), the very next day I get back another email to say that my order has been picked and packed and is in the transport system.
CD Baby have the option of shipping CDs without cases which makes the postage cheaper and the package smaller... and this was the option that I used.
Given that Australia's Customs Office managed to screw up their computer systems right before the Christmas rush an I was ordering only three weeks before the day, I was pretty impressed to see that the CDs turned up in less than two weeks. That's service, that's nice.
Righto, let's look at the Australian experience in comparison. I put my order in for two Wolfmother CDs because Wolfmother are an Australian band, they are new, they sound pretty cool (in a semi-retro, semi-metal, kind of greeny love-child way). I get a web-page confirmation that I can print out and this has an order-number and prices but does not include delivery cost.
Please note that postage is not included as part of products prices. It will be calculated based on our shipping costs table, and there are so many combinations of items possible cannot be automatically calculated at this point.
Which is annoying but no show stopper. Strangely enough, other online shops are able to calculate postage... if they get it a little bit wrong they just wear the difference. Everything Linux Online Shopper can calculate postage costs, so can CD Baby. On with the story, I put the Wolfmother order in on 2005-11-27 (nearly two weeks before I put the CD Baby order in, so it had plenty of time for Christmas).
Christmas comes...
Christmas goes...
I had completely forgotten about the Wolfmother order, figuring that something must have gone wrong and it was never going to get delivered. But it did actually turn up on 2005-12-28 (several days too late for Christmas presents). But the weirdest thing is that two packages turned up on the same day! The first one contained (roll the drums) two Wolfmother CDs, but the second one contained (roll the drums longer this time) two Wolfmother CDs!
That's right, they processed my order twice! The packages included Westpac EFTPOS dockets but no formal tax-invoice. At no point do I have real documentation as to what I have bought or how much GST I have paid... that doesn't matter much for Christmas presents, but you wouldn't want to be running a business this way. The two dockets have two different totals and the dates on them are 2005-11-28 and 2005-12-15 (two weeks apart). To add the final insult, in my bank records CD Baby manages to get their brand on the actual bank transactions (each transaction comes up with "Cdbaby.Com" in the annotation) but the Wolfmother transactions come up with "Embarking Pty Ltd" in the annotation -- a brand that has no obvious relation to either "Wolfmother" or "ModularPeople" so I'm left to scratch my head over what those transactions are doing. Getting the details right does make a difference.
Oh, and some of the Wolfmother covers were damaged... pressure on the CDs causes the little inner teeth to crack and fall off from the bit where the CD clips into the case. Just for the record, Darlinghurst (the package origin) is about an hour's walk from my house in Ultimo (the package destination).
They processed my order twice, two weeks apart and for two different prices... and all the goods turn up on the same day many weeks later. My mind boggles, how can this be achieved? Only a thesaurus can hope to encompass such aberrant, ament, amiss, askew, awry, broken, corrupt, cracked, crazed, crippled, debased, deceptive, defective, deficient, delusive, deranged, deviant, disordered, distorted, disturbed, errant, failing, faulty, flawed, half-assed, heretical, illogical, immature, impaired, imprecise, inaccurate, inadequate, incapable, incompetent, inexact, insufficient, lacking, makeshift, mediocre, patchy, perverse, scrappy, self-contradictory, sketchy, subnormal, twisted, unfinished, unhealthy, unsatisfactory, vitiated, wanting, wrong business management.
So there's my comparison between Australian industry and the foreign competition. Do we need a "Buy Australian" campaign to get the country on its feet again. Maybe Dick Smith should run around encouraging people to keep their money inside the country... but wait, maybe there's another idea... maybe we should actually compete with good quality service.
I've been personally involved with POS systems and online order entry at both Everything Linux and selling POS systems at Creative Computing and I know that the technology exists in this country to do a better job (a much better job) than what is described above.
Just in case anyone from Wolfmother are reading this... I love the album, it rocks, it's fantastic. This album sounds better in the car than it does in the lounge room. In no way do I blame the music for poor order processing and delivery.
If anyone from Modular People is reading this, sorry to have to trash you so badly but hey, you deserve it. My advice, follow some of the POS links above and talk to some people who know what they are doing.
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