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| Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) |
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| Why don't you have a shopping basket system
throughout your site? |
| Because we are able
to source and supply almost all of the many thousands of compact discs currently
available from the UK, Europe, the USA and Australasia, it is impossible
to list everything, with prices, in this web site. For this reason, we did
not have a "shopping basket" system on the site at all as we did
not want prospective customers to think that the only products that we could
supply were those listed. |
However, we recognised
that we were being forced into implementing a shopping basket (see shopping
portals below) and searched for a suitable system. This we eventually found
and it has been implemented on most of our store pages since the beginning
of June 2001.
Nevertheless, if you are unable to find any of
the items that you are searching for, please do make an enquiry or order
via our secure enquiry/order form or by e-mail.
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| Why don't you deduct VAT from CD orders
sent outside the European Union? |
| We made a decision to have a
fixed price for CDs, and to include postage in the price, regardless of
their final destination. It would be enormously difficult to allow for the
multitude of different postage rates for domestic and international postage
from the UK. |
We have found that in practice
the VAT on CDs almost equates to the additional postal cost for sending
to most international destinations. For other goods attracting VAT and where
we charge for postage, we deduct the VAT for all destinations outside the
European Union. |
| Why are your prices for CDs higher than
many "mail-order" only companies? |
| Mail-order only companies do
not keep in stock the huge quantities of discs and music that we, and other
"bricks and mortar" retailers, do. They also do not have the overheads
and expenses of running a retail store. |
We try to offer a comprehensive
service of the highest quality. We try to keep as much product in stock
as possible - although this may not be much consolation if you are having
to wait for a difficult to obtain item. |
| Why are your regular prices lower than
many major chain stores in the UK? |
| We charge what we consider to
be a fair price commensurate with the service that we offer. |
Although our overheads are high,
we do not have a store in a prime high street or shopping mall location. |
| Why is your site not found in some shopping
portals? |
| Many shopping portals
make substantial charges to appear near the top of any search in their web
sites. These charges are often very high and outside our means. Since its
take-over by AOL, ShopSmart decided to summarily kick out more than 1000
retailers (including us) from their portal because we did not meet their
"criteria". |
In our case, even
though we have been accredited by Trust UK, belonged to the Which? Web Trader
code of practice until that scheme was discontinued and have a secure server,
simply because we did not, at that time, implement a "shopping basket"
we were considered not to meet this criteria.
Schadenfreude being what it is, we have
been delighted to see that ShopSmart's share value has plummeted from
GB pounds 200 million to GB pounds 1 million!
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| Why does pressing the "enter"
key in any field on your secure enquiry/order form cause the form to submit? |
| At last we seem to have found
a cure for this annoying problem and, for Internet Explorer at least, pressing
the "enter" key should now act in the same way as the "tab"
key. |
However, if this still happens
to you, and it probably still will if you are using the Netscape browser,
please press the "back" key on your browser and continue to enter
data into the form, using the "tab" key after each field instead
of the "enter" key. |
| Why
do some DVDs not display a picture on my Television? |
| The question of
DVD compatibility in various parts of the world is very complex. |
Please see our
Notes about DVD Compatibility in
this web site. |
