Topic: [ANN] BitcoinStore launching with 0% margin (Read 9051 times)

It's been a few months, but the site is still really slow for me. Page to page navigation takes around 4 seconds on average and the search takes around 9. It's not too bad, but I could definitely see you guys haven't problems under heavy load. I have a 30 down 5 up connection so it's not on my end. :O

Best to have a look at their returns policy. I am a competitor and cannot speak on behalf of bitcoinstore, but am very interested in how they run their returns. It's tricky for merchants as most of us must exchange the large majority of BTC at the time of sale. Until we can pay overheads in bitcoin it will unfortunately stay this way. We do not profit greatly on exchange rate movements, and will lose greatly if we refunded like you wish. Having said this I do not believe the customer should lose money if they are not at fault.

I answered how we deal with returns in a separate thread if you are interested.

I don't know how you'll get it, but I'm pretty sure it will be worth $400 at the time of transfer.

Here's a hypothetical question but I ordered a $400 laptop last weekend when BTC was $1200 but after a week of waiting and it looking like no stock is arriving anytime soon I might ask for a refund.

Now if I get a refund will it be for the $400 onto a debit card, $400 in BTC at today's exchange rate or the original amount in BTC which is obviously worth a good deal less than it was last week ?

Thanks

Hey, I don't want to be a drag, as I'm sure it's been mentioned a bunch of times -- but I've actually skipped your store and bought from Amazon because I didn't realize you had certain items.  It's just so difficult to find anything.

You desperately need to put your high-demand products up front.  If nothing else, put a couple featured things up front like your Sony Xperia smartphones.  That's something that lots of Bitcoin users would actually buy, but it's impossible to find it because I have to go through stuff like shaver accessories. 

If you can't improve the search function right away please add links in the front, to pre-configured listings showing high-demand items.  This is critical to getting people to actually buy stuff.  I'm a developer, I know how much work it is to revamp a whole portion of your product (the searching), but you can at least fill in the gaps for now, without much effort by doing this.

  any problems just call them  ,it gets handle way more efficently

can i request  some assistance, my order is just hangin  up there,  no email  ,no message response so far. thanks.

Domestic orders usually ship the same day depending on what time the order was placed.
International orders first ship to the MemoryDealers office in California,  and then are reshipped to the final international destination.

All orders that are delayed because of any issue on BitcoinStore.com's side are eligible for a full refund any time BEFORE the order has actually shipped from the distributor.

The real time inventory feed isn't yet "real time"  so occasionally customers are able to order items that are back ordered.
Fixing this issue is one of our top priorities.

how many days does it take to get a order process n shipped,  and whats the refund policy  on items not processed for shipping yet, im gonna get my coins back if it doesnt ship by friday.

For reference, if you're buying the computer to be offline, you can use any system.  256 MB of RAM would be sufficient to run Armory offline.  All the offline system does is create and manage your wallets, and provide an interface for reviewing and signing transactions.  For this purpose, the cheapest damned thing you can find will work well for Offline Armory.

Online Armory is a different story.  You will need probably 4 GB of RAM, and Armory will suck up 2 GB of that.  It's the consequence of services like SatoshiDice chasing me down sooner than I could get around to revamping the blockchain utilities.  That will be "fixed" soon, but at the moment a 2 GB netbook won't cut it.

See more details in the Armory Quick Start Guide

I see on the website that the new deadline to reach 850k is June 30th. Did Ingram give you an extension on your prices or have prices changed and this is a new challenge to keep the new prices?

What email address did you send the emails from?  (Feel free to PM it to me)
I'm happy to make sure this gets taken care of for you right away.
We also have a phone number (1-888-586-6083) right on the bitcoinstore.com website that you can call any time if you feel we are not responding quickly enough.

solved!

Thank you for 7+ orders!!!

You can try http://old.bitcoinstore.com/ to check your really old order history,  but please be sure to place new orders through bitcoinstore.com

Thank you! I'll be waiting for his response. Best wishes for your store! I'm sure you will be hiring many more people.

I just brought this issue to Zlatko's attention and he should get back to you with answers to your questions.
He has been overwhelmed with orders each day thanks to the great number of orders from the Bitcoin community.
We just hired another support person today (Ericson Ramirez), this Brings the total Bitcoinstore.com team members up to six of us.
Lots more big improvements will be coming soon!

Hi!

Yesterday I put an order in for a Western Digital 4TB External Hard Drive. I put the order in without registering an account. The website said the item was out of stock but I put the order in anyway because it's an easy way for me to cash out my BTC. I sent in a support ticket asking about when it will be in stock, shipping time (I'm in New Jersey, USA), tracking info etc. I get a response from Zlatko telling me you can't mail to a P.O. Box and need my physical address. That's fine so I responded with my physical address. The problem is that he didn't answer any of my questions about the item being in/out of stock, shipping time, tracking info etc. Along with including my physical address in the response I also re-asked these questions. It has been 24 hours and I have received no response. My order number is 100000567. I will appreciate a response soon. I need these questions answered so I know when to be home to wait for the package. I hate when I miss a package!

Kind Regards,

Michael

Update: I just received a response from Zlatko saying the order has been submitted. He totally ignored all of my questions. Could somebody please help me?

what time is the last possible moment i can buy to beat the march 31 st deadline,  eastern pacific or  btctalk forum time up in the corner. these suckas are worth more n more by the hour.

how much ram do i need to run   armory,  thanks for the help guys

Any international VAT taxes will be charged by the shipping company to the customer.
Bitcoinstore.com must report the true customs value on each shipment,  but I wouldn't lose any sleep if someone from the deep web started offering to reship our products internationally and under declare the customs value. 
There is likely a lot of money to be made with this business model.

Last sunday 24/3, did I put an order for a notebook and a tablet. The question is
how long the delivery time will be, shipping to Scandinavia. Did choose Fed Ex Int. Priority or something like that.
 

That doesn't have enough RAM to run Armory.  Bitcoin-qt will work, although it'll be a bit slow.

Netbooks are just smaller and under powered compared to regular laptops.  I don't see any reason that it wouldn't work for what you want to do.

Also, this netbook on bitcoinstore is $30 bucks cheaper than on amazon. Nice.

http://forums.cnet.com/7723-19680_102-313546/what-s-the-difference-between-netbooks-and-notebooks/

Question to Bitcoinstore:

International orders, do they include US VAT/sales tax ? This is normally in the range 5-10% ? There wasn't any mention of it in my order, so I wonder if this is usually paid by the customer, or deducted for international orders?

Acer Aspire One AOD270-26Dkk 10.1" LED Netbook - Intel Atom N2600 1.60 GHz-   im gonna get a cheap laptop for armory, this is the cheapest one, netbook will work too right? i dont no the diff between  laptops n netbooks.

I ordered a wifi router from BitcoinStore. Delivery took 9 days from the day of shipping, which I am content with, as I live in Norway. The product was received in fine condition and worked as promised, I would certainly use BitcoinStore again.

I see now that the target of 850000 by March 31st is not yet reached, it's at 38% and as far as I can see 332K USD worth of products are sold. To be honest, a shop that's not been existing longer than this, and using only a new internet currency that's still in it's early days - for such a shop, I think the current results are great. I sincerely hope that the shop can continue. Would it perhaps be a good idea to also accept traditional payment methods in parallel to bitcoin, to increase the sales volume even more ? I know that would be kind of against the philosophy of the site, but let's face it - most online buyers still use traditional payment methods. Then instead of worrying that shop has to close down because of lack of sales volume, one could rather be concerned about increasing the bitcoin slice of the sales. For example, one could give a certain rebate costwise for sales done with bitcoins vs. sales done with traditional payment methods. That would give an incentive for people to shop with bitcoins rather than straight USD. I personally would certainly pay with bitcoins if I knew I could save 5% off the price.

Another issue that could be at play and hampering the success of bitcoinstore.com right now, may be the fact that the bitcoin price is climbing so much, so that may lead to a lot of people holding onto their bitcoins, and rather fork out their card to pay the traditional way.

Still in my eyes, bitcoinstore has been a huge success.

Can I have you recheck your load times? We've recently bumped up our hosting.

Cheers,
-Jon

May I suggest having a long hard think about your current hosting setup.

A couple of people have mentioned bits of downtime, and chrome dev tools are suggesting an uncached page is waiting about 2.5 seconds for the first response from the server and up to 9 seconds to load the entire page. This is early days for the site, but your traffic is only going to get heavier.

http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_091409.html
Suggests ~50% of users will leave an ecommerce site if it takes more than 2 seconds to load, and this was in 2009...

The fact that it is early days means it's crucial that you show you have a reliable, fast and resilient website.

Other than that - I like it, adequate design and a nice big selection of items. I've not ordered anything so can't comment on the checkout system.

With the latest USPS price increases in February international shipping is usually not worth it.  The small flat rate box a few years ago was $13 and tracked.  Then it was $17 and poor tracking until February.  Now it is $24 and basically not tracked.

Even on a $200 item that is a 10% penalty.  They would need (and hopefully will) expand into a Euro warehouse and products to get the cost down.

Ok, just bought a hardware product from Bitcoinstore.com and shipping it to Scandinavia with United States Postal Service - Priority Mail International, will give feedback here as to how this goes.

Order process was fairly simple. Had a bit of a problem finding the desired product through their product search though.

We're looking into ways to make it cheaper. A lot of international taxes target electronics though.

Seems back up...

Hmm,

this has probably been asked before.

The shipping cost to Europe nearly eat up all savings compared to ordering something locally.

Do you have planned to add cheaper/local support for Europe if you expand further?

Guys, store is offline. What's up?

ahh I see. I think I might have put a typo in my email.  The transaction details on my electrum wallet though say 976 confirmations. (I also didn't print out an order confirmation  )
Transaction ID:
fda4d7bd13e0153b1db3f3ea015ba6fed9fe3f8b209b55282fc79d9859f06470

blockchain is down though moving servers...

thanks for the help!

Email your order number to roger at bitcoinstore.com and I will take care of it for you.

Lots of people are sending the payment, but then not clicking the button to actually submit their order to the site.
If you haven't gotten a confirmation email,  that is likely the case with your order.

Either way, I can get it taken care of for you.

I ordered a netbook 6 days ago and haven't received anything yet... is this normal?

I think displaying two exchange rates will confuse a lot of people. Just show your actual exchange rate. You can put an entry in the FAQ explaining that your rate is the ask price on MtGox. You could even hyperlink the exchange rate display to the FAQ entry if you think enough people will wonder.

i guess they are waiting for 6 confirmations (~1 hour)

How long does an order remain in "Payment Review" status?  What's there to review when payment is made in an irreversible currency?

This is whats holding me back from buying a sack ton of stuff for my PC build.

Bitcoinstore, Please can you do something about the mechanism for ordering & international shipping info (UK).

Cheers.

The price on the site is stuck at 40.03 - it stayed there as the price dipped down close to 39 and now it's near 40.60. Something's wrong.

I'm pretty sure that's a 10-pack. I'm looking at why it's not showing the quantity.

Search function is very bad at the moment, some prices are wrong
http://www.bitcoinstore.com/samsung-840-pro-128-gb-2-5-internal-solid-state-drive.html
Samsung SSD 840 Pro 128GB for 35 bitcoin is a little  expensive.
From UK web page work very slow, and biggest issue for me, you dont have any information abaut international shipping (UK).

Speakers arrived today and they work great.  Tested them tonight with Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Green Day, and Beethovin while we worked on today's honey orders.
I don't remember the prices, but BitcoinStore was cheaper than Amazon, and shipping wasn't very much either.

Thanks guys.

Please do the best you can to make sure you don't cause the website to go down while you are making updates.  Twice now since you've announced the 0% margin, I've attempted to tell someone about this great new use for bitcoin and show them the site only to find that it is not available.  Then I look stupid for recommending something that seems flaky and unreliable, and you guys lose potential customers who may not give it another look when it comes back up.

Several people are working on it full time.
There will be lots more improvements to the website soon. 
An improved search is near the top of the list.
Thank you for your support!

Do we know when search will improved? Last week I was able to search "wireless headset" and get about 30 results, all reasonable. Today when I search it comes up with 1500+ items and most neither wireless nor headset.

how exactly does the bitcoinstore determine its bitcoin rate?

will i get a different rate depending on the final checkout amount?

I just ordered some flash drives, pricing was good and checkout easy!

We'll be doing a whole slew of articles on how to get newbies used to Bitcoin and BitcoinStore. I think that it is an uphill battle, but why not lure them up the hill with a financial gain?

I think at the end of the day, if there is plentiful information, and getting bitcoins is easy enough, they'll find their way to our door, so to speak.

Community members like you will be definitely involved in spreading that info, hopefully I'll have some documents that'll make your explanations easier. Thank you so much for what you're doing!

hey I hope you reach your target

I just bought a laptop and all, so can't spend now, but I am trying to help

Every time I hear someone wanting to buy something electronic at school, I tell them I might know I site that's cheaper
So I show them the site and it checks out cheaper even with the expensive shipping rate to my country ($60 can't you make a better deal with an other company?, or a workaround)

but even then I'm fighting an uphill battle with spreading the word,
so far I got 3 responses saying,sure they can be cheaper: we will see how long they will stay open, if they don't pay their taxes (somehow they think using bitcoin entails not paying taxes)
and one law student asked me if I was sure bitcoinstore respected consumer law (refunds wise)


Do you guys get the same response? or are you wise enough not to mention it to people not familiar with bitcoin

Yeah, I saw that just minutes after I posted my question, so I deleted it thinking there was no longer any need for a response.

I might message him and talk about a partnership!

Anyways, in regards to your earlier message we're back up. Sorry about the downtime.

Cheers,
-Jon

Nah, just some guy selling merch with a BTC logo on it.  He isn't even accepting bitcoin as payment.  USD only.

Now if Kim did start a BitcoinStore, that would really be something, wouldn't it?!

You gave me a heart attack there. I thought Kim had started a BitcoinStore

Bro, you've already been one-up'd by the Bitcoin Megastore: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--148569

Bought a bunch of stuff for a computer for my girlfriend, and made a comment on your facebook page but I figured I'd make a note here as well, might stir up some discussion.

1. Search/categorization is pretty awful right now, though I can accept this as a new tech store trying to make sense of all your inventory.
2. On everything I bought, prices were below amazon and newegg. Nice!
3. Would love a bit more information about shipping/shipping options. What's the difference between free shipping and the 5$ shipping? Would be nice to have it be something like Free shipping (USPS) and $5 shipping (UPS) or something like that. On that note, an eta or blank spot for tracking numbers would be fantastic in the order menu.

Note, it's pretty clear they're working on new categorization and sorting options from the response I got on facebook. I'm excited for it!

I really like the advancements that you've made with the UI. It's much better now! We decided to do some promotions for Bitcoin Store at our site (A Finnish Bitcoin portal with 15000+ monthly visitors) simply because we want to support this site.

So if there are more than the usual amount of orders coming from Finland, you can thank us. I will personally order some stuff soon.

ordered > Acer Aspire One AOD270-26Dkk 10.1" LED Netbook - Intel Atom N2600 1.60 GHz

That is a 20-pack, but for some reason they aren't pulling in or displaying the field that specifies that information so there is no way you'd know.  If you were to buy it you would get 20 of them, however.

Well, that was a very helpful question.

Perhaps you might be willing to point out which item(s) are incorrectly priced?

We're back, guys, and we are *thrilled* at the response you gave us! First and foremost, we apologize for the downtime. Starting from 7:15PM we started handling so much traffic it actually completely overloaded our hosting provider's servers. The good news is we have scaled our servers up to accomodate and will be looking into ways to further optimize our server stack to handle the increase in load.

Thanks for sticking with us at Bitcoinstore!

It's been down for approximately 12 hours?

Going to be hard to reach their $800,000 goal that way.

i hoped to find something useful for me, but the site seems down at the moment

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://bitcoinstore.com/

At the moment I have the socks I need.  But I am looking for some type of holographic sights such as these:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_sporting-goods?_encoding=UTF8&field-brandtextbin=EOTech&node=3375251
Looking for a range finder too.

Might the BitcoinStore start selling some electronic sporting goods in the future?

Hope it's back up soon!

Strange, the site is down since about 5 hours :-(

You don't have to but it's probably a good idea. The Armory installation instructions recommend a specific version of Ubuntu.

this is just an idea but what if you offered some bitcoin bounty for a redesign of the site? I mean the appearance and organization and everything. like a 20 bitcoin bounty or something... bad idea?

I'm thinking about ordering that netbook. Offtopic question: can netbooks print the backup for the private keys on the offline armory wallet? Do I need to overwrite the operating system on netbooks with some linux variant to install the offline armory wallet?

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bitcoinstore.com

The site appears offline for me.

looking to buy a computer desk chair

bitcoinstore.com/rffc-11006-fabric-task-chair.html  $66.97  (no picture had to google and found newegg for the picture)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16846202295  $49.99  (free shipping)

bitcoinstore.com/rct03b-high-back-executive.html  $84.62  again no picture. next link is the first result on google
http://www.provantage.com/rosewill-rct03bp~AROSW0KV.htm $47.05


bitcoinstore.com/rffc-11002-middle-back-leather.html  $76.19  no picture (this one actually does look a bit cheaper then other places)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16846202291 $99.99

http://bitcoinstore.com/rct04bf-middle-back-fabric.html  $83.93  no picture but seems to be a good deal
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16846202228  $129.99



some seem to be deals from a very quick google. others 20-30 dollars cheaper on the first google result


going to do a bit more searching around tonight but if the bitcoin price is reasonable i'll use this over anything else

I couldn't see your shipping policy.  Do you ship internationally? e.g Australia

I'm keen to spend a few coins.

Comments:

I was surprised the site is not completely SSL enabled.
Split out Tablets into there own category.  i.e Highlight/Promote "trendy" products

FYI, I ordered an Acer 24-inch, 1920x1200, IPS LCD monitor from BitcoinStore.  I received it in the time frame expected (in a couple days), and everything was peachy.  

There was a problem with the purchase, displaying an error about shipping calculations and I had to contact customer service.  It was resolved very quickly, and it may not have even affected overall delivery time.

By the way, a 24-inch, 1920x1200 IPS LCD monitor is an excellent deal for ~7 BTC.  Granted, the backlighting is a little weird, and the colors were slightly off, but I was able to adjust the settings and it feels close to my other IPS monitors  (in terms of display quality).  If you don't know, "IPS" monitors are typically much more expensive than "regular" monitors because of the display technology.  Most importantly, the viewing angles are dramatically better.  This is especially important for large monitors, since the wingspan of the flat monitor typically induces non-90-degree viewing angles towards the edges of the screen.

By the way, I do agree that the search & organization of the site could use some improvement.  You need to at least make it easier to find the higher-demand products.  I was disappointed to find out you didn't carry any smartphones ... but then I found you do!  But I had to do some digging. 

P.S. -- If you start offering the Google/LG Nexus 4, you'll get my money right away

Don't forget to wear your favorite pair of Alpaca socks!

I am deployed to Afghanistan and people here use Amazon almost exclusively. I believe because the shipping is free and gets here in one or two weeks.

Does BitcoinStore send to APOs? And how would the shipping be? I work with a lot of geeks with expendable money.

I have high hopes for this site. I've made a purchase already, and was pretty satsified with the results.

However, as pointed out earlier, the search function (even the advanced one), isn't as dynamic as sites like Newegg. If I'm looking at buying a new TV, laptop, etc, I'm probably going to do a search for technical specs, as opposed to searching for a specific manufacturer. Right now, I would have to manually view each poduct to see if it meets my minimum specs for size, processer speed, etc. I pointed out the site to a few tech buddies who do most of their purchasing on Newegg/amazon, and their overwhelming concern was that the site didn't look "polished." On a positive note, having to learn about bitcoins to buy things wasn't that much of a concern.

Also, the website doesn't display certain things well on an IE 8 browser. It's not my choice to use that browser, but sometimes I'm stuck with it.

+1 +1

Just placed my first Bitcoinstore order.

Looking forward to finally having some nice computer speakers at the kitchen so we can listen to some Grateful Dead concerts on Internet Archive while we sit around the table rolling honey caramels

Yep. I use one myself for my offline armory wallet. Shame Bitcoinstore wasn't around when I bought it as I see the prices are really competitive on there. 

You can't put a price on security

I was looking on amazon tonight for a raspberry pi and a raspberry pi case. Just looking though.  I was thinking about getting one of the netbooks but it seems like a netbook might be overkill for an armory (offline)wallet. HMMM

I really tried to find something I needed, but being a software engineer, I kind of already have all the computer/tech gear I need.  I looked through your car audio stuff, and it's all pretty low-end (Pyle, BOSS, Power Acoustik).  If you had some higher-quality head units in there I might have bought one.  Sorry - I'll try and remember next time I need something techie.

You are right.  When I first visited the page, the difference was 1%.  When I went to post, the numbers were different and I didn't think to recalculate the %.

Looks good now!

As a broke grad student, I can't do a lot, but I will make a purchase...the Bitcoin Store is making all of our holdings worth more and I hope other people recognize this as well.

Thank you for all your hard work!

It is about $850K needed total per quarter to maintain the contract.
Currently we are about $50K of the way there.  (I'm not planning to cash out the coins if possible)

I'm aware that the site isn't actually ready yet and still needs a lot of polishing,  but I was running out of time to meet my sales quota for Q1 of 2013.

I hope the Bitcoin community can come together to help buy a lot of stuff.
This will help Bitcoinstore continue to improve and maintain the supplier contract into the future.

$0.16 difference does NOT equal a 1% fee.

The MTGOX price displayed is the most recent trade value on MTGOX.
The BitcoinStore price is based on the highest ask price on MTGOX.

Sometimes this value is the same,  sometimes there is a spread,  but you will always get more via BitcoinStore.com than you would by selling your coins on MTGOX at the same instant.

That is great, thanks! So, is that 850k in addition to the current balance, the total received, or from today onward?

So, are you guys not cashing out immediately on receiving payment? It looks like most of the balance is still there. If you're staying in BTC as long as possible, that's ballsy as hell (and kind of awesome.)

You can track our progress here:  http://blockchain.info/address/1JqjoFF8QZwidrTbfnihGHDeu16pbLia1q

That is the payout address for all the orders that come through Bitcoinstore.com

Please help us ready $850K USD by the end of next month!

i'd like to request a fluid layout (so it takes up the width of larger monitors like amazon/newegg)

Yessir, you'll also be able to measure it by how frantic our posts become!

We've made a decent number of sales prior to this month, but we'll need to really push it to hit our quota.

Will you guys update us with sales milestones so we can see how much more you need to reach 800k?

I'll check. It should be indexing the brand very high on the search.

search is terrible. shop has amd cpus yet searching for "amd", "AMD", "am3" or "AM3" all turn up nothing. "AMD phenom" however displays some gamepads...
filter shows manufacturer "AMD" two times. also, loading times are very very long.

sry, but by the time i found the things i want to buy the first month is probably over.

We're using BitPay's rate last I checked. They pull it from multiple exchanges, which causes the deviation from Mt. Gox's. It also might be slightly lagging behind.

I did some price comparisons and BitcoinStore is actually cheaper this time (unlike during beta when "cheaper than Amazon" really meant "cheaper than some third-party sellers on Amazon").

The hidden 1% fee due to the exchange rate used is a bit deceptive.  I would rather just see higher prices with the proper exchange rate.

I would prefer the navigation bar not to have moving letters.  I find it distracting (I just end up playing with it instead of actually checking out the products...).

But keep up the good work!

Site is slow for me.

http://BitcoinStore.com

---

Hello!

We've officially launched out of beta. Take a look at our site, try out the new search, and check out the new prices. They're even lower than the beta period. We've launched for this first month with 0% margins because we need your help. We need to make $800,000 worth of orders in order to continue to qualify for our supplier contract.

BitcoinStore was created in order to apply pressure to big online retail store like Amazon and NewEgg. We need your help in order to do this. Please order something (I assure you that you can find something you need in our massive catalog) and help us show Amazon and NewEgg that Bitcoin can save consumers a bucketload of money. If we can get big enough and start pulling consumers away from them, they'll have no other option than to accept Bitcoin.

Here's an article below with more info, thank you for all the community support so far, we'll be announcing a couple more things this week!

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoinstore-formally-launching-today-0-markup/

Thanks,
-Jon