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Frequently Asked
Questions - FAQs |
1. Do you have stock of everything
shown in your website?
2. If a product is not available,
why is it advertised on your website?
3. Can I go to your location and
pick up the product I want to buy, so I can avoid the shipping cost?
4. How much do you charge for shipping?
5. I placed an order and it has
been more than a few days and I have not received any other
communication. What is going on?
6. I have emailed and/or called
your company several times and I can still not get a tracking number.
How can this be possible?
7. I want to cancel an order.
Why can I just cancel by sending you an email telling you the order is
cancelled?
8. I received a product and it does
not work. What should I do?
9. I found a product in your
website with a price that is way below any competitor in the market.
Can that be possible?
10. I found a product in Google or some other website
advertised at some price and when I clicked on it your website showed
another price. What is going on?
11. I read in your policies that you have strict policies
regarding returns and exchanges, and I was surprised to see such high
restocking fees. Why are they so high?
12. Why do you have a Minimum Purchase Amount?
13. Do you offer Installation, Training or Technical
Support?
14. Can you explain more about SHIPPING?
15. Which truck delivery services are available? |
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| 1. Do you have stock of everything
shown in your website? |
| - No. We drop-ship directly from
our suppliers to our customers over 99% of what we sell. We
publish products based on our suppliers price lists, and our website has
no real-time connection to our suppliers inventories. Although we
continuously work to remove obsolete products and correct mistakes, this
is a time consuming manual process and because of the sheer number of
products we have, there is always a substantial amount of products that
are either obsolete or are out of stock. Therefore, we encourage
our customers to contact us before placing an order, to confirm
availability, price and shipping cost. |
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| 2. If a product is not available,
why is it advertised on your website? |
- We advertise products based on our
suppliers price lists. Our website is maintained manually and it
is not "connected" to our suppliers' inventories. At any given
time our suppliers could have sold out of a particular product.
Although some suppliers email us their inventories periodically, most do
not. The only way to find out about stock with many suppliers is
to call them and ask. When we find out something is not available,
we immediately remove it from our website.
-If you order or call about a product that ends up not being available,
it means we just found out the no-stock when you ordered or called us. |
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| 3. Can I go to your
location and pick up the product I want to buy, so I can avoid the
shipping cost? |
| - No. For the same reason
explained in FAQ #1, we don't have stock in our office and we drop-ship directly from
our suppliers to our customers over 99% of what we sell. So we
have no products in our offices in Miami (with very few exceptions). |
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| 4. How much do you charge for
shipping? |
| - Just add the product(s) you want to
buy to the Cart, and then press the CALCULATE SHIPPING button in the
Shopping Cart. Please note that although we try to calculate
shipping adequately, our systems might sometimes calculate too high or
too low. If you think the shipping cost is too high,
contact us to review
it. If we get an order, and we then get a shipping quote from our
supplier and they quote us higher than our system calculated, we will
contact the customer letting him/her know about the discrepancy.
The customer can then decide to proceed or to cancel the order. |
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| 5. I placed an order and it has
been more than a few days and I have not received any other
communication. What is going on? |
| - As soon as we get an order, we check
availability & prices with our suppliers. We have several
employees doing this full time. In many cases the information is
readily available at our suppliers websites, so orders can be processed
quickly. However, in many other cases our suppliers are not so
technologically advanced, and we have to call or email them, sometimes
repeatedly. This process can take a few days, as some suppliers
themselves are drop-shipping from the manufacturers and they too have to
do the same and wait for a reply from the manufacturers. |
| - When a customer places an order that
is shipping to the billing address of his/her credit card, the credit
approval is quick. We authorize the credit card and the Credit
Card processor confirms that the address, zip code and security code (CVV)
all match. However, in many cases customers want to ship to
alternate addresses or the billing address they provided does not match
what their Banks have in their system. In those cases our Credit
Dept takes further steps to confirm that whoever placed the order is the
rightful owner of the credit card. This process might take a few
days, since we continuously receive orders from fraudsters using credit
cards and we are trying to avoid fraud. |
| - We constantly get calls from
customers that placed orders that were cancelled because of lack of
stock, and we did send cancellation emails within a couple days of the
order. However, our email was incorrectly routed by the customers'
computers to a spam or junk folder, so they never noticed the
cancellation email. So please check your spam/junk folder before
contacting us about the status of your order. |
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| 6. I have emailed and/or called
your company several times and I can still not get a tracking number.
How can this be possible? |
| - In the very few cases we ship from
our stock, we usually ship within 24-48 hrs of the order being
processed. But mostly we depend on suppliers to drop-ship to our
customers. When a customer calls or emails, we immediately create
a CASE and send a copy of the Case to the customer. We have a
Customer Service Department who's daily goal is to find the answers the
customers seek and solve any customers' problems that arise. Once
a Tracking Case is created, our Reps will email and call our suppliers
repeatedly, asking for tracking information and/or status. We have
some suppliers that are great and provide tracking immediately. We
have others that take a few days to get back to us, even when we email
them and call them repeatedly. What happens in many instances is
that our Supplier is also drop-shipping, probably from the Manufacturer,
and the Manufacturer takes time to ship and to provide tracking.
Some other times our Supplier was expecting a shipment of that product,
and that shipment got delayed. Some other times our Supplier has
to prepare the product or specially package the product and that takes
time. For these and many other reasons, there might be delays in
the shipping of the products and in providing the tracking for them. |
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| 7. I want to cancel an order.
Why can I just cancel by sending you an email telling you the order is
cancelled? |
- Since we drop-ship from our
suppliers most of what we sell, we cannot always cancel orders.
When a customer wants to cancel for any reason, we first check if the
order has been processed or if we have already worked on it (checking
stock, verifying the credit card, etc). If no work has been done
in an order, then it is very easy to cancel and we email a cancellation
without any major problems. If we have already worked on an order
but the order has not yet processed, then it is still easy to cancel and
we email a cancellation to the customer, but to offset the cost of
having worked on the order we charge a cancellation fee (see our
policies). If the order has been processed, it means that we
already sent one or more Purchase Orders (PO) to our suppliers. So
we must email them asking for a cancellation and they must respond to us
confirming the cancellation. Otherwise, the products might ship or
might have shipped, in which case there's no cancellation possible.
If we succeed in receiving cancellations in writing from our suppliers,
we then email the customer cancelling and also charge a cancellation
fee, to cover the costs of processing the order and cancelling it.
- Even if you sent your cancellation request before the order was
processed, we might not be able to cancel. Cancellation requests
sent via email go to the Customer Service Dept Inbox, and the order
might be waiting to be processed in our order entry Dept. When
Customer Service gets to it (it is not immediate) the order might have
processed, and we have to wait for our supplier to cancel our PO in
writing.
- For the aboe reasons, DO NOT ASSUME that your order is cancelled just
because you sent us an email or called us asking to cancel. |
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| 8. I received a product and it does
not work. What should I do? |
| - If you receive a product that
apparently does not work, the first thing you should do is contact the
Manufacturer, speak to a technician and let him/her troubleshoot the
product over the phone. If after troubleshooting the technician
determines that the product is defective, you can ask the manufacturer
if they can exchange it for you. If they tell you it is OK to do
it through them, then we encourage that option. If they tell you
to exchange it through the dealer, contact us immediately. We will
open a Case, will contact our supplier, will obtain a Return
Authorization (RA) and instructions. We will then email those
instructions to you. You will have to ship the unit back to our
supplier according to those instructions, at your expense. Once
they receive it we will have them ship another unit to you, at our
expense. If you decide you don't want an Exchange and just want a
refund, you will also be charge restocking fees. The reason for
this is that many customers that don't want a product any longer
complain that their product is defective to avoid restocking fees.
To summarize: A defective product has to be shipped back at your expense
and the new unit is shipped at our expense, but in case of Return with
no exchange, Restocking and Return processing fees will apply, even when
the product was defective. |
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| 9. I found a product in your
website with a price that is way below any competitor in the market.
Can that be possible? |
- We try to have the most competitive
prices in the market. In many cases we do have exceptional offers.
We work with over 500 suppliers and always look for bargains.
However, there are cases in which prices may be incorrect. We try
very hard to keep our website updated and we have several employees
working full time adding, removing and correcting information.
Sometimes prices may be incorrect in our website because:
1) Our employee made a mistake (typo) when uploading or updating the
price of the product;
2) At a certain point in time there was in fact a supplier selling that
product at a closeout price, but that supplier sold out and all other
suppliers are selling the product at a higher price;
3) The manufacturer raised prices and we did not get to update the
price;
4) We also change prices using software and this is not always 100%
perfect.
- Whenever we find a mistake we will correct it immediately.
- It is our policy not to process orders for items that have an
incorrect price.
- Your online receipt or the “acknowledgement of order”
automatically issued by our system does not signify our acceptance
of your order, nor does it constitute confirmation of our offer to
sell."
- Because of the above reasons we encourage our customers to contact
us before placing an order, to confirm price, availability & shipping
cost. |
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| 10. I found a product in
Google or some other website advertised at some price and when I clicked
on it your website showed another price. What is going on? |
| -
The only price that matters is what you see on our website. Our
prices can change at any time, and Google and other websites might have
old information. Many times, we don't have control of what was
copied from our website and how often do other sites "refresh" their
information. And even when we do feed Google with prices, they
take a couple days to update their information. So in some cases
customers will see old prices in other website. Therefore, the
only price that is relevant is what is listed on the website at the time
you are purchasing it. |
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| 11. I read in your
policies that you have strict policies regarding returns and exchanges,
and I was surprised to see such high restocking fees. Why are they
so high? |
- Since we don't stock products, we depend on our suppliers to accept
returns or exchanges. In the case of returns, our suppliers
usually charge us high re-stocking fees that can go up to 40% in some
cases. And we charge a $25 return processing fee to cover the cost
of our employees that have to deal with the time and paperwork required
to process a return.
- We believe that 40% is not really high considering that a product that
has been returned cannot be sold as new and many times it cannot be
resold even at 50% discount from the price of new. It is much more
difficult to sell a returned product than a new product, and the
retailer or wholesaler can get "stuck" with it for a long time, having
to close it out at a later time at 5% to 20% of the original cost.
- We understand that nobody likes to receive a defective product.
And generally we do accept Exchanges. In case a product arrives
and it doesn't work, we ask customers to please call the Manufacturer
Technical Support line. Many times that solves the problem.
But if the Manufacturer determines that the product is defective, most
of the time we can obtain a Return Authorization from our supplier.
The customer would need to ship the defective unit to our supplier at
his/her expense and we would cover the expense of shipping the New unit
from the supplier to the customer. However, when a customer calls
us to say that a product is defective and wants to return it and not
receive an exchange, it is
not so easy to obtain a Return Authorization, and if we are successful
our suppliers almost always charge high restocking fess.
- Many customers don't understand why are our return policies so strict.
They compare it to buying something at a large retailer. The main
difference is that Large Retailers have such purchasing power that they
can force the manufacturers to take back units at the expense of the
manufacturer, giving them full credit for each product, which they can
pass on to the consumer. We don't have such power and many times
our suppliers do not accept returns even if we offer them to pay
restocking fees. So don't assume you will be able to easily return
a product if you are "not satisfied" with it. We will try to help
when we can, but we cannot promise we will successfully process a return
for every customer every time. |
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| 12. Why do you have a
Minimum Purchase Amount? |
| Although we would like reality to be
different, the fact that most of our suppliers do not provide us with
real-time inventory requires us to have a Purchasing Department that has
to check availability, cost and shipping cost on almost every order.
Then, because our margins are very small and we cannot afford to lose
money to Fraud, many of the orders have to be manually approved by our
Credit Department. After approval, orders go to our Order Entry
Department, which authorizes the Credit Cards and enters the orders into
our internal Accounting System. All this manual labor results in a
high cost of processing each order. This high cost per order,
added to a low gross profit margin means that we actually lose money on
each small order. We would love to please all our prospective
customers, but we simply cannot afford to process small orders. As
a way to help customers fulfill their needs in case their orders are
smaller than $100, most of our product pages will show a list of
competitors and their prices, just below the picture of the product.
Please feel free to explore our competitors' websites. |
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13. Do you offer
Installation, Training or Technical Support? |
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We are an eCommerce Dealer who mostly
drop-ships from Distributors. In most cases we don't even see the
product. We deal with hundreds of thousands of products and it
would be impossible for us to train our people on all the products.
Also, since we are not physically at the location of our Customers, it
is not possible for us to offer Installation or Training. If you
need Technical Support, please contact the Manufacturer of the product
and be aware that not all Manufacturers provide Technical Support for
their products. Some Manufacturers will simply say that you have
to "ask the dealer", in which case we will not be able to help you and
we would recommend you find a local dealer or service center than can
help you once you hire them (and pay them) for their help. |
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14. Can you explain more
about SHIPPING? |
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Shipping Speed: Generally it takes 1-3 days to process an order.
When an order is received, we have to check stock, cost and shipping
cost with each supplier. Also, some orders require Credit
approval, especially when the Billing address does not match or when
the product is shipping to an alternate address. Credit
approvals might delay processing of orders. Then, once our
supplier receives the order, they need to process it and ship.
That might take additional time. We normally offer GROUND
shipping, which takes 3 to 10 business days to arrive after it gets
shipped from our supplier. In some cases we are able to commit
to faster shipping, depending on the product, weight and volume of
the product, size of the order and most importantly reliability of
the supplier. We try not to commit to anything faster than
ground if we are not confident that our supplier will ship on time.
Many orders ship the same or the following day after they are placed
and if our supplier happens to have stock in the same state the
product might arrive the following day. But many other orders
get delayed because the supplier took too long to answer us, our
Credit Dept took a couple days to get it approved, our Supplier took
a few days to prepare and ship and the warehouse the product shipped
from was on the opposite side of the Country. So, some lucky
customers might receive the product the next day even when they are
paying for Ground shipping. Some other customers might have to
wait 2 to 4 weeks to get their product. Of course we try to do
everything as fast as we can, but many things can happen on an
order. On average most customers receive their
products in 4-7 business days after placing their orders.
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Shipping Carrier: Most products are shipped by UPS or Fedex,
except when they are too large or too heavy, in which case they have
to go by Truck. We don't chose the carrier; our supplier (for
each transaction) does.
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Signature Required: UPS or Fedex generally give the products to
any person they find at the destination. However, by default
we don't ship with "Signature Required", so UPS or Fedex might leave
a package on a porch or outside the door, whenever they there's
nobody at the destination and the UPS/Fedex driver thinks it is OK
to do so. Truck shipments always require signature.
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Truck
Deliveries: The default shipment shipping charge is for "Dock to
Dock" to a Commercial Address. If you need curbside or liftgate (to
lower products from truck to the floor), Residential delivery,
Inside or Threshold delivery, "White Glove" delivery, "Call prior to
shipment" or any other Optional service, you must CALL US BEFORE
placing your order to obtain a shipping quote. If a delivery is made
and the shipment is refused because an optional service was not
purchased, you will be charged for the shipping back and forth.
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15. Which truck delivery
services are available? |
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Whenever
possible we ship by UPS or Fedex. But when not possible, they go
by truck. There are different services available:
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Commercial Dock-to Dock: Truck Delivery to a Commercial (non
Residential) loading dock. Customer is responsible for
unloading product, final placement, unpack and debris removal.
Not available for residential deliveries.
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Curbside Delivery or Liftgate Service: Delivery personnel will
present goods to ground level at rear of delivery vehicle.
Customer is responsible for final movement of goods, unpack and
debris removal. Some companies charge extra for Residential
service and some companies include it on their charges for curbside.
Please call us with any questions.
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Threshold or Inside Delivery: Delivery personnel will place
goods inside first exterior doorway, garage or carport. In
most cases this includes up to four (4) steps exterior to first
doorway (this may vary by trucking company). Customer is
responsible for final placement, unpack and debris removal.
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White
Glove or Full Service: Delivery includes inside placement to
room of choice, unpack and debris removal. Some trucking
companies include maximum carry of up to 20 stair steps. Other
companies charge extra for each flight of stares. Please call
with any questions or any site-specific service requireements.
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