SimonB

In South Africa there is a saying “The price you see is the price you pay” this may be true in large retail stores like PicknPay but is this the case when doing online shopping?

Lets take a look at a recent shopping spree from the online store Wantitall.co.za

After playing with the idea for the last few days to purchase some new techno gadgets I headed over to wantitall.co.za to purchase the goods.  After surfing for the best deal for about an hour my shopping cart started looking rather full and at just over R7000 I felt my limit was reached.  I then noticed a banner offering 10% discount on purchases. Now who says no to discount right. So I quickly jotted down the voucher code and continued my purchase.

On checkout however I am not getting 10% discount using the voucher, So I email support and get the following responce:

"I checked the code on our system and it does have a maximum amount of R100.00.
I also sent a mail to our web manager as that should have been
displayed on the banner."

A few emails back and forth with support and they not gona budge to give the full 10% even though the mistake is clearly on their side. Oh well so much for that, I mean there is no such thing as the ‘discount you see is the discount you get’ so why waist further time pushing for it.

So I head back to the checkout page, I do a quick refresh to make sure the connection is working and now I see that instead of me owing Wantitall R7000 they owe me R518.00

You can imagine my surprize. I think to myself wow now this is great customer support, they feel so bad about offering clients 10% discount when in fact it was only R100 that they are now paying me to take the goods. I quickly fill in the checkout form and submit.  Oops another error.  This time something about the form not working with minus amounts.

So I give Wantitall a call and ask whats going on. Apologies for the inconvenience, its a bug with our pricing system….  So needless to say I have still not ordered my techno gear. grrr

Getting back to the “The price you see is the price you pay” it would seem that for online stores in South Africa this is not the case and when it comes to discounts, The discount you see is definitely not the discount you get.

Note: At the time of this blog post the faulty 10% banner has not been updated.

Update: On a positive note - The dudes from wantitall made contact with me within 24h and have now fixed those nasties.  They are really lucky that this never happened to them, poor Dell wasn’t so lucky.

How can we take Twitter to the next level?

I propose selecting one charity every week from the website www.givengain.org we then link to this charities donation page via the hash tag #time2give and everyone can then contribute a little something from the heart towards this charity .

I have chosen GivenGain because I find their online donation tool easy to use and it works from most countries on earth.

Even if we only each give a small amounts our combined donation could clock millions of Dollars each week and this could go along way to helping less privileged individuals in our society.

I recently ran a test campaign on Twitter to trial this idea on a small scale.  We raised $101.25 from 5 people in 24h, thats $20.25 per person, not bad.  If 5 people could give $100 how much could 10 000 people give.  I would suggest giving a minimum of $10 when making a donation because bank charges eat up smaller donation quickly, but in the end it’s totally up to you to decide how much you can give.

GivenGain provides a list of NPO’s around the world and further I propose running a pole on #charitytuesdays to see who the next charity will be the following week on #time2give. The charity that gets the most votes during the pole will be in line for the next #time2give challenge.

To kick start this concept, I have chosen a charity that can be used as the first beta test run.  I have chosen this NPO for 3 reasons.

1. This project is close to my heart.
2. I manage the GivenGain account for this NPO which means we will be able to track stats easily.
3. I also run the blog for this charity and can blog the results for everyone to see.

Using this charity will allow us to see after one trial run if the idea is working.  It will also give us an idea of just how powerful this concept is and I think it will be a good place to start.

Obviously I am open to any suggestions from the community, so please feel free to share ideas, comments and rants either here or via my twitter account.  @simonbotes

The charity I have chosen to start with is Amawheelies - The Wheelchair Farmers of Thaba Chweu.  You can read more about Ama Wheelies on their GivenGain page.

I propose starting the #time2give event every Friday Evening and running it until the following Friday.

So to kick start this even copy the message bellow into your twitter and lets get #time2give rolling.

Consider giving $10 towards this weeks charity http://tinyurl.com/loku4f #time2give

Ps. If this idea gets traction, I will run a pole on #charitytuesday to see who the next charty will be to benefit from #time2give.  If you support this idea please RT the message above and drop me a line in here so I can get an idea of popularity.  Please also make a small contribution to the first charity on #time2give

Pss. Please also tweet this blog post.

Thank you.