I’m trying to buy a printer ribbon (an ancient office consumable still guaranteed to shower me with hundreds of “sponsored links” upon Googling), and none of these fucking douchebags will give me even ballpark shipping before going through the rigamarole of signing up for one of their useless-after-this-purchase accounts.
I’m starting not care how much they’ll charge, but apparently while a mere 1/23rd of them are willing to ship to Canada, they still require the above exercise in futility to share that information with me.
I hope they all get bitten by syphalitic dogs and have to order medication from a central african webshop with a flaky DB backend. :mad:
I just bought a hinge for a Brother copier. Hinge itself was $18.95 “+ shipping”.
I figured that hey, the price is good, they can’t gouge me THAT much for shipping. It’s less than a pound. How WRONG I was. $18.95 (then they order the part from Brother to repackage, although the website said IN STOCK) and then another $13 for shipping!
I, however, am of above average savvy in the screwing customers department. I had them use my UPS account. $13 became $4 like that. Ah, the humanity. Still took 3 weeks to get here, but I feel better about myself.
I decided to buy my bacon salt after reading that the company that makes it ships to Canada for the same prices as to the U.S.* After having a couple of good gouges for shipping, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy (there’s some stuff I’d like to get from a United Statesian website that would probably fit in a big envelope, but they want to charge me something like $25 USD to ship it here. I guess I don’t need it that badly.) So, yes, I fully support this rant.
*I’m just afraid it’s going to show up with UPS hosing me for COD custom charges like they did once.
Lots of brick-and-mortar stores here in the States (RadioShack, Staples and Best Buy, for example) can still order printer ribbons, if they don’t stock them. Staples does even still stock a few of the more common ones. And they don’t generally charge for shipping unless you have it sent to your home; even when they do, they’ll tell you up front how much it’s going to be.
I was going to buy Codeweavers Crossover for Mac, and have them ship me a CD. Cost of software? $65. Cost of CD? $10. Cost of shipping the above? $60. Yes.
My only option for shipping to Canada was DHL International Courier. Which would show up at my apartment when I was at work, try to deliver the package, fail, and then I’d have to go though all kinds of annoyance to get the package.
There was no option for shipping via post, which would arrive via Canada Post and after delivery failed, end up at the little post office across the road from my apartment and I could pick it up the next day.
I just downloaded the thing and paid the bare $65.
The company I’m renting the printer to requested it, so the surprise is already blown.
Staples actually had a really good clearance deal on compatible ribbons, and while they charge 15$ shipping, it’s free if you go pick it up at the store. Unfortunately (as I suspected), the couple they listed as being in stock were inventory errors. They refunded my $$$ and offered to special order them for 9$ each if I bought 3.
I ended up getting 2 from a specialty store for 25$, which I don’t feel bad about 'cause the service was great and they offer to re-ribbon the carts for 5$.
Last week I bought a watt meter through an eBay store. Didn’t get the one that was listed cheapest, I bought from the guy that had the non-insane Canadian shipping cost.
Actually, the most annoying ribbon vendor let me get all the way through the site, make an account, then sign up and start filling out the Google Pay info before declaring that they couldn’t ship to my address, and to go to their .ca address instead of .com. The prices on that site were more than the exchange rate should account for, and they didn’t support Google Pay for some reason.
I hate it when you don’t know if they ship internationally until you go to checkout. If they don’t have it in the FAQ or Service Questions part of the site, you usually have to just try it and see.
Even worse is when they say they ship internationally, but then lock you in to a US shipping address—with no obvious way to change anything.
PayPal was the worst problem I’ve had recently. The seller supports international orders, PayPal’s service is supposed to allow for international orders, but I had to do some stupid workaround (which ended up backfiring and needed even more email back and forth between me and the shipper to get things cleared up; I still haven’t gotten my stuff because of the delays) all because PayPal disables the choice of country and locks in a US only shipping address when you use a US credit card.
Gods forbid I should want to send things to friends I have in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, or England—especially when the seller provides international shipping. I wonder if those businesses know how many sales they’re potentially losing because of international customers being stymied by PayPal?
If I had the right technical skills, I’d start up a service that properly supported international ordering and financial transfers. There are a lot of people who are frustrated with the arbitrary barriers and shortcomings of what’s out there already. There’re no legal problems that I’m aware of, just piss-poor implementations.