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Amazon Sellers’ RIP OFF delivery charges!

If you use Amazon you have probably encountered a listing by a ‘Seller,’ an organisation or individual who uses Amazon as a means to sell their wares. It’s a bit like an eBay shop, only, because it’s Amazon, it appears a bit more legitimate and you don’t have that nagging doubt at the back of your mind you’ll be ripped off or scammed in some way. Pfft!



Check out the seller’s delivery charges before you buy anything!

Rip off number 1:

Here’s an example. I bought a TomTom car satnav from Amazon, Post & Packing (express delivery): £5.01 (fair enough). To go with it, I bought a universal mains charger – cost: £3.75, from Star e-Shop. On the seller page it says free delivery. Ah good, I thought, free delivery. Oh wait, I want it to get here about the same time as the TomTom so I’ll get it shipped express instead of standard. What do you think that would cost? £3.99? The same as the TomTom? No. £10.98! For a £3.75 bloody charger!

Here’s a screenshot of the sneaky delivery charges page [you may need to find the scroll bar at the bottom of this page]:
Amazon seller, Star e-Shop, rip off delivery charges

Note the part of where it says ‘per Item’ – £3.99 (still seems reasonable, right?). Now cast your eye to the part where it says ‘per Shipment’ – £6.99. That’s right, they charge you £3.99 for the item PLUS £6.99 for the shipment; total: £10.98! For what?! Shipping it as express instead of standard?! Now my understanding of the pricing was that if you had one item it would cost you £3.99 (i.e. the ‘item’) OR £6.99 if there was more than one item – i.e. ‘per shipment.’ Seems they charge you for an item and then add a shipment cost onto the top. WTF?! Complete RIP OFF!

Here’s Rip off number 2:
Believe it or not, this one is even worse than the Star e-Shop’s outrageous charges. This rip off is by ExpressPro.

While I’m using Amazon I remember I need to pick up a couple of Microphone jack plugs. Total cost for both jack plugs is a whopping £0.94. That’s right, less than one pound. That’s how cheap these things are. Now what might you think standard delivery on those would be? Free? £3? Nope. £7.70! Now stupidly, because these things were only £0.47 each, I didn’t look at the delivery charges before I bought them (something everyone does on eBay) so now I’m stuck with their outrageous £3.85 per item delivery rate! Actually, I didn’t look at the other one either but it was Amazon and they are careful to stop shit like this from happening, right? Apparently not.

So there you have it – £18.68 delivery charges for items that cost a grand total of £4.69! What a complete rip off. I really feel like I’ve been utterly scammed.

Update:
I’m actually angrier at the moment about Star eShop than Expresspro, probably because the package from Star eShop arrived and I was able to see the true cost of the postage – £4.95.

Think about that for a moment. Star eShop (sucks) offer free standard delivery, so by my reckoning the package would probably cost them £1.25 to ship standard (but nothing to me), the ‘expedited’ delivery I asked for cost £4.95 so the difference is about £3.70. This is the approximate figure I should have paid to get express delivery rather than (free) standard, i.e. the difference in cost. What they also charged me was a rather inexplicable £6.99 on top of the difference, grand total; £10.98 delivery on a package that only cost them £4.95 postage!

Update 2:
Now the other items from ExpressPro have arrived. Now pissed off as equally as I am with Star eShop.

Envelope is A6 sized and both items (microphone jack plugs) were in the same envelope. Postage merely marked as 1st class (i.e. £1.25 at most).

Posted in Angry, Internet, shopping, wtf?.

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By Soapster – 2 September, 2009

Cloning a hard drive

So, given my recent motherboard issues I decided to revise my data and hard disk backup plans. First thing I wanted to do was find a way to clone a hard drive. The second thing I wanted to do was find a way to backup my data without having to go through the hassles of setting up an external hard drive and waiting forever to squeeze the huge volume of data through a usb2 cable.

Was it possible? Yep!

Acronis make some nifty software to do just that. One is called ‘True Image’ which handles not only disk cloning but recovery and backups and the other, if all you want to do is go for hard drive cloning, is called ‘Migrate Easy.’



All you need is another hard drive and they are remarkably easy to install, not to mention very cheap at the moment. Seat the drive in the holder, fix it in place, plug your SATA cable into the motherboard and the power cable into the hard drive and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to disconnect your PC from the power supply before you do it, obviously. If you have an IDE drive you need to slave it. All that involves is setting the switch or jumper on the back to ’slave,’ plugging in the IDE cable instead of a SATA one and you should be good to go. If you can’t tell the difference – an IDE cable is the ribbon type while a SATA one looks more like a USB cable.

Run the Acronis software and use it to add the new hard drive to Windows, give it a reboot just to make sure and you should be ready to clone your old hard drive.

You can read the Acronis forums (hosted on Wilders for some reason) and have a run through all the usual unhelpful ‘don’t do it this way, do it that way’ type posts or you can just run the software and clone your hard drive using the automatic option. Takes a while but at the end of the process you have a perfectly cloned hard drive.

Only thing you have to remember is you need to unplug the old drive and set the new drive up as if it were your old drive if you want to boot straight into Windows. By that I mean switch the cables around.

You might also need to fiddle about a little in BIOS to set the boot configuration but it’s easier than it sounds. [del] key during the early part of the boot sequence normally does the trick to get to the BIOS menu.

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By Soapster – 24 July, 2009