Doc B.
Member of the Trade: Bottlehead Corporation and The Tape Project, LLC
I do apologize for the problem. And I thank you for paying the amount we requested. This is certainly no excuse, but I will attempt to explain a root part of the problem. We have had glitch in our server for several months that does not allow us to use the UPS API that automatically calculates the shipping when an order is placed. International customers will notice that they don't experience this since the USPS shipping calculator API works well. We determined a while ago that the proper solution unfortunately involves an entire revamp of our web site, a new shopping cart and a move from our secure dedicated server to a new secure cloud based web host. This is in process but will likely take a few months to complete. The length of time for our request to be sent to you was bad form, I agree. And I apologize for what was an apparent case of our letting it slip between the cracks (sorry, bad pun).
In an effort to help our customers understand the issue, I have in fact taken some good advice from your detailed and extensive email to us and added information about this issue not only to the places we have already posted it on our forum for quite some time, but also on every single product description page of our web site.
Regarding the use of a gmail address, I'm not sure how many of us here actually use a private domain name based email, but I can tell you that services like gmail, yahoo, sbc.net, etc. pretty much scrape all of those into the spam can these days. It's become quite difficult to communicate with our customers via our corporate email addresses because of this.
Guys, we've only been doing this for 22 years. I am the first one to admit we don't know everything and the first one to admit that we don't always get it right. And I will also admit to what is a personal foible - your email, while professional, presented the situation as a more or less lost cause in that you made it clear you were determined to post your grievance on head fi regardless of a response from us. Unfortunately perhaps for both of us now, my reaction was that a response would make no difference. I am not saying that was your intention, it's just how both myself and my wife Eileen interpreted it. Once again I sincerely apologize.
In an effort to help our customers understand the issue, I have in fact taken some good advice from your detailed and extensive email to us and added information about this issue not only to the places we have already posted it on our forum for quite some time, but also on every single product description page of our web site.
Regarding the use of a gmail address, I'm not sure how many of us here actually use a private domain name based email, but I can tell you that services like gmail, yahoo, sbc.net, etc. pretty much scrape all of those into the spam can these days. It's become quite difficult to communicate with our customers via our corporate email addresses because of this.
Guys, we've only been doing this for 22 years. I am the first one to admit we don't know everything and the first one to admit that we don't always get it right. And I will also admit to what is a personal foible - your email, while professional, presented the situation as a more or less lost cause in that you made it clear you were determined to post your grievance on head fi regardless of a response from us. Unfortunately perhaps for both of us now, my reaction was that a response would make no difference. I am not saying that was your intention, it's just how both myself and my wife Eileen interpreted it. Once again I sincerely apologize.