Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

It's the Net, we don't need to provide service!

One of the great things about shopping online is that there are bargains galore -- and you can save a heap of money without ever leaving the comfort of your home.

Unfortunately, those savings sometimes come at a huge cost.

As regular readers will know, I'm on the lookout for a new video camera with which to film content for my two YouTube channels.

Now that I've cracked 10,000 subscribers and am about to break the 20 million video-views mark on one of them and the other is also picking lots of pace I feel justified in parting with some of my hard-earned cash to pour back into the enterprise.

So I went online to see what bargains were to be had...

One camera that appears to be the "least bad" in its class is the Panasonic TM900.

It does wonderful HD video in 1080p, has a fist-full of manual controls, writes its video to standard SD cards, has an eyepiece viewfinder and scores quite a few other ticks on my check-list.

So I did some searching for local prices and came up with a "not bad" price from GlobalMediaPro.

This company proudly announces that it is an NZ company and clearly states near the top of the page "Free delivery from stock in Auckland".

So far, so good!

However, I did some checking and it appears that they actually drop-ship a lot of their product, which explains the "1-2 week delivery" time for that TM900 camera.

Now while $1,590 might not be a lot of money for some people, it's a significant portion of my wealth right now and the performance of the camera I buy is absolutely crucial to the future of my online enterprises so I had a few questions for GlobalMediaPro. I wasn't just going to hand over a fist-full of money by way of a non-reversible bank transfer) until I had those answers.

"Simple" I thought... I'll either give them a ring or drop them an email...

Oh if life were that simple -- and this is where the "cost" of a low price starts becoming very apparent.

I went to their "Contact Us" page and found that before I could even make an inquiry -- I'd have to register and create an account.

WTF?

Okay, so I'm a serious buyer and, much as I disliked jumping through hoops, I did just that.

Now the contact form was displayed and I set about typing in my questions.

I clicked the "send" button and was told that the form could not be submitted without an order or a quote number. The little pull-down menu which contains the order/quote numbers pertaining to your account was empty. Another message told me that I should create a quotation request -- so I did.

However, when I went back to the contact form, there was still no quote/order number in the drop-down list so again, my contact form could not be sent.

By this time I was utterly gobsmacked that a company could or would place so many hurdles between a potential customer and a purchase.

When a copy of the quotation request arrived in my mailbox, I replied to it -- explaining that if the company was this difficult to contact *before* they had my money, there's just no way I'd be buying a single damned thing from them. I also asked them to delete the account I was forced to create on the promise of making contact and not to send me any unsolicited pitches for their products.

Now I don't know if GlobalMediaPro are a reputable company to deal with (perhaps they are, although I have subsiquently found a number of complaints from disgruntled customers: [example 1]) [example 2 [example 3].

The fact is that I am prepared to forsake a little in the quest for a lower price but I'm not going to put up with this kind of silly firewalling nonsense.

Life is just too short to risk doing business with a parallel-importing drop-shipper that puts deliberate road-blocks in the way of any attempt to contact them.

So, I may have to pay a little more -- but I'll find another place to buy my video equipment -- a place where people value potential customers enough to actually correspond with them.

GlobalMediaPro -- your socks are smoking and there's a hole in your shoe!

This customer is still looking a half-decent company to take his money.

And, to show that this isn't just a problem with smaller independent vendors, try to find a general email contact facility/form on the US Panasonic website

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say on this...

PERMALINK to this column

Oh, and don't forget today's sci/tech news headlines

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font