Oct 15 2013

DX (DealExtreme) Woes

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 11:49 am

Where to start with this post? Well to provide some balance, I’ll start with the positives…

DX offer a mind-boggling array of goods. Sometimes they are difficult to find elsewhere (especially in Kazakhstan), sometimes the prices are a great deal cheaper than in the shops, and the delivery (worldwide) is free! It doesn’t matter whether something costs $200 or $2, or whether I want something delivered to our home in Britain, or here in Astana, the P&P is always free. Free delivery is slow, but unless your needs are urgent, it is OK. When the order arrives.
And so begins the bad side. I ordered an item (an Xbox 360 controller adaptor for PCs) on the 3rd of June this year. Previous orders had been sent to our home in Britain, and arrived fine. This package did not turn up though. After three months (deliveries don’t normally take any longer than 4-6 weeks), I submitted a ticket through DX’s Help Centre, on the 13th September.

I’ll just quote my messages and any replies, rather than try to rewrite them all again.

Me 13th Sept

Good afternoon. It has been three months and one week since I placed this order. It still hasn’t arrived. Please explain what procedure needs to be followed – I will be back in Britain by the time a replacement would arrive, so it would need to be sent to my normal (CUT,CUT, Swansea, CUT, UK) address, or if that is not possible, a refund is requested. Thanks.

Me 16th Sept

Your live chat said I’d receive a reply in 24-48 hours. I just wanted to check this ticket hadn’t been accidentally missed?

DX 16th Sept

Dear Customer,
We apologize for this long delay in the delivery process. In the meantime, would you please confirm your shipping address below? If the address is right,please go to your local post office to check and keep me informed.

FirstName: Irina
LastName:Merriman
Phone Number: +7701 CUT

Country/Region: KAZAKHSTAN
State/Province:Astana
City: Astana
Street1: CUT
Street2:
Postal Code: CUT

Yours Sincerely,
Customer Service

Me 17th Sept

That is the correct address.
I have been checking with the post office weekly. There is still no sign of the package, and the staff there said they do not think it will arrive, as parcels don’t normally take that long.

Please see original comment – if a replacement is sent, please use my British address, as I will not be in Kazakhstan by the time it arrives.

Thanks.

DX 21st Sept

Dear Customer,
Thanks for your swift reply.
I am afraid your package got lost on the way. We can resend it or
give you refund (or save the money as store credit for your future purchase).Please kindly advise your choice.

Looking forward to your reply.

Yours Sincerely,
Customer Service

Me 21st Sept

Please see the original message – I would like it resent, but _NOT_ to the same address this time, as I will not be in Kazakhstan much longer. Please send to the _British_ address you have in your system –

CUT
CUT
Swansea
CUT
Great Britain

Thanks.

DX 23rd Sept

Dear Customer,
Glad to get your message,we can send the goods to your new address.
But would you please tell me the address as the following form, so we can make sure you will get the order without problem.

FirstName:
last name:
Phone Number:
Country/Region:
State/Province:
City:
Street1:
Street2:
Postal Code:

Yours Sincerely,
Customer Service

Me 23rd Sept

Thanks for responding. There does seem to be a problem with communications/comprehension here. I’m of course happy to repeat the address in the format requested however, as I’ve mentioned already, it is the SAME address as my only other order (so far) with your company. See Order # CUT .
FirstName: Irina
last name: Merriman
Phone Number: +44 1792 CUT
Country/Region: United Kingdom
State/Province: Swansea
City: CUT
Street1: CUT
Street2:
Postal Code: CUT

So… these problems happen, and since a replacement item will be sent out, I’ll not be out of pocket. The same day, DX did indeed create a new (billed at $0) order, and got ready to ship it. Unfortunately, they had put in the Kazakh address. I was asked by their system to rate the assistance provided by their customer service team.

Me 23rd Sept

Assist you with courtesy and patience: 8
Quickly understand the problem and handle it properly per your request: 3
Show knowledge of the products/services and solve it professionally: 8
Make the reply clearly and easy to understand: 6
Help you understand the cause and the solution to the problem: 5
Rate this Solution: 0
Description:You have sent it to the WRONG address. Please do re-read the messages on this ticket. I can’t believe this has happened. Not at all impressed. PLEASE send the missing item to the address I have repeated multiple times. NOT THE KAZAKHSTAN ONE!

I had hoped that by contacting the “live” customer support, I could put a hold on the order before it was actually shipped.

DX Agent: Welcome to DealExtreme, nice to meet you !
DX Agent: Free live tracking numbers are only available on orders above $15, there is no live tracking available for your order.
DX Agent: Your order has been shipped out on 2013/9/26 21:57:35 without tracking number. Usually it takes 2-6 weeks to reach you. We appreciate your patience while your order is in transit. The delivery time varies from different destinations and different shipping routes.We cannot ignore any unexpected reason causing the delay.
Chris Merriman: STOP
Chris Merriman: for god’s sake

DX Agent: OKAY
Chris Merriman: read my message and understand the background
Chris Merriman: please

DX Agent: FirstName: Irina
DX Agent: LastName:Merriman
DX Agent: Phone Number: +77015350121 Country/Region: KAZAKHSTAN
DX Agent: State/Province:Astana
DX Agent: City: Astana
DX Agent: Street1: Flat 8, 9 Turan Ave
DX Agent: Street2:
DX Agent: Postal Code: AST010000
Chris Merriman: This is beyond a joke
Chris Merriman: WRONG ADDRESS

DX Agent: iS THE ABOVE address correct
Chris Merriman: No
DX Agent: if it was not corret
DX Agent: please open a ticket now
Chris Merriman: I was asked which address this replacement should be sent to
DX Agent:

https://cs.dx.com/ticket/Check/Order.Delay check and ask for resend please
DX Agent:

https://cs.dx.com/ticket/Check/Order.Delay check and ask for resend please
Chris Merriman: I explained it twice, as it seems staff do not always read previous messages within the same ticket when replying
Chris Merriman: after all this delay and problems, DealExtreme ignore everything and send it to the wrong country.

DX Agent: Please hold on for a moment while I check on that for you.
Chris Merriman: Thank you
DX Agent: please open a ticket now
DX Agent: You are welcome.:)
DX Agent: It would be highly appreciated that you would give me 5-Star rating after this chat. Please click “Close” button at the top-right corner to complete the rating. Thank you for chatting with me.
Chris Merriman: it isn’t an order delay
DX Agent: yes
Chris Merriman: that link does not appear to help at all
DX Agent: if the address is wrong please open a ticket to get resend
Chris Merriman: @Haven’t received packages after 20 days waiting@
Chris Merriman: is the title

DX Agent: yes
Chris Merriman: arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh
Chris Merriman: forget it
Chris Merriman: I’ll try again in the morning
Chris Merriman: goodbye

DX Agent: You are welcome.:)
DX Agent: We apologize for any inconvenience brought to you.

That didn’t work, and I was told to submit a new ticket back with their normal DX Help Centre

Me 26th Sept

I was given a link to this page by your live chat. This package is not delayed by 20 days or more. The original order was. This order was a resend. Your livechat agent today seemed to have difficulty originally understanding what the problem was, and upon perhaps comprehending, seemed to think this was still the correct page. (“Haven’t received packages after 20 days waiting” is the page’s title. Perhaps there isn’t a “staff repeatedly not reading messages properly, package sent to wrong address” page?) Please see the existing ticket for #CUT. AND READ THE MESSAGES. PROPERLY. It seems that staff have a problem properly responding to information sometimes. YOU HAVE SENT THE PACKAGE (which was originally ordered in early June, never arrived, and has now been re-sent) TO THE WRONG ADDRESS. read the ticket. please. send the package to the correct address that has been given explicitly twice, and implicitly an additional time. I’ve previously recommended DX to friends and customers. This debacle is making me wonder if I made a mistake. I would dearly love for this to be sorted QUICKLY, you have ALL the information you need to resolve this matter, read the previous ticket, use my account information. This could have been sorted more quickly and certainly with a lot less frustration for me.

Me 1st Oct

Five days later, and not even an acknowledgement?
Please respond ASAP.

DX 5th Oct

Dear Customer,
sorry for the inconvenience we caused,because we came back from our

holiday so we had not answered your question in time,pls understand.i try to enter the previous ticket,but it seems it not found now.so i think you have problem in your shipping adress?

Yours Sincerely,
Customer Service

Me 5th Oct

No, that ticket still opens fine. I’ve copied in the details below. If you read my description for this ticket, you will see the problem is that
you
have
resent
the
parcel
to
the
wrong
address.
I have typed out these problems so many times now. I really do not understand how your company is able to consistently make so many mistakes.
Previously, agents have either not read the history on a ticket, or just appeared to give me random, unrelated, responses.
I ordered an item on the 3rd of June.
It did not arrive.
Eventually you agreed to resend the package.
I had, from the very beginning of the ticket, repeated the correct address this package should be resent to.
After a lot of frustration, everything seemed to be understood.
You resent the package. TO THE WRONG ADDRESS.
I will not be here in Kazakhstan by the time the parcel arrives. By the time I return, the post office will return the parcel as undelivered.
This will then take us to SIX MONTHS since I

(message exceeded their maximum, so I continued with another one, and also attempted to paste in some of the old ticket information, as they somehow apparently couldn’t access it)

originally ordered

Seriously. This should not be complicated. Send my order to the correct address. READ responses before replying. Find some way to keep severely annoyed and disappointed customers happy, when repeated mistakes are made with ONE order.

ALL INFORMATION YOU REQUIRE HAS BEEN SENT TO YOU. MULTIPLE TIMES. PLEASE DO NOT REPEAT QUESTIONS AGAIN. IF YOU CAN NOT FIND THE INFORMATION YOU NEED, ASK A COLLEAGUE TO RE-READ THROUGH THIS FIASCO FOR YOU.

DX 6th Oct

Dear Customer,
I fully understand it,but the package is full shippped in ,so

we can not change the address,the wrong address item will return to

us.Then we can cope with it.We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Yours Sincerely,
Customer Service

So with the original order not arriving, the replacement being clearly sent to the wrong address, despite all the information being available to DX, waiting for that resent parcel to not arrive, sent back to DX, and then ANOTHER attempt to send my order out, I’ll be waiting around six months!


Nov 06 2012

Alex http://t.co/fsE5aATo

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 9:18 am

Alex instagr.am/p/RrDadQHJRV/


Nov 06 2012

Alex breaks out of character @ Sydney Opera House…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 8:34 am

Alex breaks out of character @ Sydney Opera House instagr.am/p/Rq-PmwnJcs/


Jun 01 2012

Half For Alex

Category: Friends,VideosChrisM @ 4:22 pm

I was just going to ask you on Skype, but you’re not around right now. Probably asleep. Anyway, I’ll doubtless forget when we do cross paths online, so decided to write it here. Basically, how did the one photo per day project go? In case you need some motivation to re-start/continue it, I noticed this YouTube video and thought of you…

The other half is similar, but for anyone interested in hair growth, specifically face fuzz 🙂

I’ve gone with the whole wet shaving my entire head apart from a goatee-shaped (as mentioned to Lara recently, acually Van Dyke-shaped) area around the mouth. Which will probably last until shaving frequently gets boring, and I go back to general short fuzz everywhere again 🙂


Sep 15 2010

Alexa Toolbar Comes To Chrome

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 11:10 pm

The title for this post probably doesn’t require a great deal of clarification, but just in case…

Chrome – This is an internet browser made by Google. Like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or even Safari. (There are others of course, but as people using them make up less than 2.5% of this site’s visitors, I’m happy to gloss over them for now).

Alexa Toolbar – This is some code that will tell you how popular a website is when you visit it. The lower the number, the better, so if your site had an Alexa ranking of 1, you would (theoretically) own the most visited site in the world. Until recently, only Internet Explorer and Firefox users had access to the official Alexa toolbar, and I believe it was only this one that actually registered visits to the sites you frequent, within Alexa’s system. (Other toolbars/extensions exist that will tell you the rank, but they do not tell Alexa to +1 to the number of visitors for a website on any given day.)

Comes to – It now exists 🙂 See their blog post here, or if it is down again and you don’t fancy checking Google’s cache of the page, head on over to here directly for the download link.

I should point out that some people (and anti-malware programs) will report this toolbar as something that needs to be removed. It does, after all, meet most definitions of spyware – a company records details of every site you visit. However, if you decide to locate the download, and then initiate the installation procedure yourself, I’m assuming you know what it does and are happy with this system.

Finally, many people make the argument that Alexa’s stats are not reliable (they only count people with the toolbar installed) and are easily gamed. So don’t go losing sleep if your site slips down in the rankings, or assume you’ll be able to sel your site for a 5 figure sum, just because you make it into the top 1000.

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Apr 28 2010

This 1 is4 AlexC and Mat. No i…

Category: Pictures,TweetsChrisM @ 9:45 am

This 1 is4 AlexC and Mat. No idea if detail will show, but they’re lopping the tops off the trees outside our flat http://twitpic.com/1j0ia0

Tree Height Reduction Scheme

Tags: ,


Sep 20 2009

Alexa Rank slowly recovering t…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 7:08 pm

Alexa Rank slowly recovering to how it was 2 years ago.Check out stats for:chrismerriman.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chrismerriman.com

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Mar 25 2009

Alexa vs. Unique Visitors

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 4:00 pm

I’m still confused by my Alexa rank – it has been hovering around the 900k for a while now, whilst my non-bot unique visitors per 24 hr period has re-stabilised in the 350-700 range recently. I remember when I was getting half that traffic and in the high 200K range when it comes to Alexa. Hey ho, did discover that I’m the 69,553rd most popular website in the Czech Republic for some reason!

Tags:


Nov 22 2008

Alex Is 21 Again?

Category: Friends,PersonalChrisM @ 2:33 am

Given that we were in the same year at school, it isn’t too hard to guess her age, but anyway, here’s hoping she is having a superb day…

Happy Birthday

Tags:


Jul 23 2008

RealRank vs. Alexa

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 9:37 pm

Last night a friend was asking me the difference between a site’s Alexa rank, and its Izea Realrank, if it has one.
I decided to create a quick post in the hope that it will help others.
First, lets go through the basics…
Alexa rank has been around a long time, and is supposed to give an indication of how popular (in terms of unique visitors, measuring one visit per day per IP) globally, compared to others.
How are these visitors recorded? Well if the page contains an image looking something like this…
Alexa
… then each and every visitor is counted. If the image, or one similar to it is not present, then only visitors with either the Alexa toolbar, or a toolbar with the Alexa code in it, are counted. In either case each visitor is only counted once per day, to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from simply refreshing their own sites all day long. (That isn’t to say there aren’t other ways of gaming the system.)

So, onto Izea’s Realrank… This system is a little different, in that it doesn’t just include raw unique visitors per day. Within the equation for calculating a given sites rank, the pageviews and inbound links that are actually used to arrive at the site. The data is gathered by a snippet of code being inserted into the template for each page of a blog.

Because of the difference between the way the two ranks are calculated, it is entirely possible for two different sites ranks to go in opposite directions within a given time period. For example, below we have a graph representing ChrisMerriman.com’s RealRank, followed by a another graph showing laaneworld.com’s. The third graph is just one combining the two sets of data.

CM Realrank
Other Realrank
Both Realrank

Below we have the same site’s (in the same order – ChrisMerriman.com first, then laaneworld.com)Alexa rank over time. As you can see, the trends are not necessarily transferred from one rank to another…
CM Alexa
Other Alexa


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