Topic: Introducing BitCoinz SuperStore - bitcoinz.ca/shop (Read 5509 times)

When will your site be available to purchase items from again?

Love the site.  Prices look good.  As soon as I build my bitcoin up enough I have my eye on a few items.

Hello everyone.
I'm posting my experiences with BitCoinz.ca.
I purchased an 8" Android tablet on July 13, 2011.
My product arrived to my house on August 2, 2011.
The shipping took a while to come from China. A few days ago, I was curious if there were any updates that the site owner could give me. He responded quickly and professionally. I would definitely recommend this service to others. The shipping may be slow, but that is the fault of China Post, not the site owner.

Hello All,

I would like to thank all my customers that visited my store this week. First week has been great. I have performed an upgrade to the site, now it should look more top tier. I have added more suppliers so the range of products will improve over the coming days. I strive to add new products everyday.

Our categories are:

AV Equipment
Cameras
Camping / Survival / Outdoors
Car Accessories
Cell Phones
Computer Accessories
DIY
Electronic Cigarettes
Gadgets
Glasses
iPod / iPad / iPhone
Lasers
Lifestyle
MP3/MP4/MP5/E-Book Players
Netbooks
Pipes / Bongs / Lighters
Radio Controlled (R/C)
Spy Gear
Tablet PC
Toys
Video Games

Please follow us on twitter and FaceBook.

Peace

Thanks for the information... I guess ultimately the only way to be truly anonymous is to unplug from the net completely.

They both set cookies. They can personally identify you all they want; though Google seems to promise you need to opt-in first. You (and possibly your users) need to review the relevant privacy policies.

- http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

- http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

My reading of that is that you are not anonymous until 6 months have passed: by which time you may have visited the page in question again, resetting the timer.

- http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ads/

- http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/ads/privacy-policy.html

They go on to say that they don't use your personally identifying information without your consent, but I fail to see how information about your interests is not personally identifying.

If I am more knowledgeable about these things than the average person, it it probably because I have a bad habit of reading fine-print. That is one of the major reasons I am interested in bitcoin: on the surface, less onerous "Terms of use" to follow. Though, some of the onerous terms in Credit Card agreements seem to stem from anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws.

Hello,

Thank you phillipsjk for your input. I have adjusted my terms of service to address the refund issue. You are right refunds should be in BTC not USD. As this is a new venture there are still kinks to be worked out. In regards to privacy I will not share any data with anyone else. Facebook and Google Adsense of course do their own thing out of my control. Unless I am mistaken all they can track is IP#'s and visitor numbers and similar metrics, they do not have the reach to gather your personally identifiable information. Please if I am wrong let me know and I will figure out how to word the privacy policy better. I greatly appreciate your knowledgeable input in these matters.

Thank You,
Trevor Andrew Wozny

Looks like refunds are priced in USD, rather than bitcoin:
- Terms & Conditions

Depending how long it takes an order to be canceled, somebody may be very upset to only receive the "current USD equivalent" of the order. This would be especially true if the bitcoin price doubles during that time, meaning only half the BTC paid is refunded. Would holding the bitcoin until the order ships be so hard?

Edit: The Privacy Policy is misleading:

While it may be true that bitcoinz.ca does not share the data with third parties directly, at least two third parties are invited to do their own tracking and data-mining using their own code hosted on their own servers:

• http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php in an iframe
• http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js loaded from inline scripts in the page.

VPoro,

You make some valid points and it looks like he's addressed your concerns.

Awozny,

Thank you for your work.

Hello,

I have noted the recent comments about Bitcoinz.ca/shop. I have removed the "directly" from my manufacturers comment. I did not realize it would cause confusion and accusations of it being a scam. We do deal with Dealextreme as noted above. Dealextreme is just the first supplier I have setup and many more will follow.  I have added mention of the drop-shipping aspect of the operation. My store is still in it's infancy and I truly apologize for any confusion I may have caused. I value all your input. I am an engineer by trade and Bitcoin enthusiast by passion. I believe in the viability of the Bitcoin economy and just want to do my part to make it a reality.

It is a legitimate operation I assure you. I have had many, many orders over the past few days . Thank you all for your patronage. Please forward me any comments as suggestions.

Peace.

Thank You,
T. Andrew Wozny

Small markup - yes, 25% markup... I still think that is a ripoff. Of course, if you are willing to pay 25% extra for the convenience of not using Mt. Gox or some other exchange to swap your BTC -> USD, this is probably a great service.

The true ripoff part comes from the fact that he's claiming to order the products 'directly from the manufacturers':

"We strive to provide the absolutely lowest prices to the Bitcoin community.

We deal directly with the manufacturers of all our products. This guarantees that we can pass along the lowest rock bottom prices for all the items you want. These manufacturers are not quite as fast at delivery as the big box retailers. Our shipping will take a little longer than some retailers, but our prices are considerably lower because of this, you will save a lot of money when you buy from us."

If you act as a dropship for DealExtreme, fine, but be honest of what you are doing - just say: "You can order products from DealExtreme through us with a 25% markup on top of the prices you would get from the original source. This is a service which allows you to bypass the exchanges-step and directly buy items from DX with BTC."

However, if they really order the items from the manufacturer, they probably should explain why the descriptions are 1-to-1 with DX including the typos, and the images are the same (including the same file names), just lower resolution to not to use the DX waterstamped ones.

He's letting people buy products usually only available for dollars using bitcoins. This is a useful service, that increases consumer options and does not in any way rip off people. Every one already assumes that goods priced in bitcoins are likely marked up from their dollar purchase price, but people are willing to pay the small markup in order to bypass the credit cards.

Your website seems to require client-side scripting.

For the record, I think the 6000mW figure must be EIRP. "EIRP is the product of the maximum output power available at the antenna terminal of the transmitter and the antenna gain." OET Bulletin No. 65, Supplement C (footnote 19, Page 18, pdf 22)

I like that many of your computer products seem to be Open-Source Software friendly. For example, your USB 2.0 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n 150Mbps WiFi/WLAN Wireless adapter should work with both BSD and Linux based systems (not tested yet..) due to the Ralink chipset. The exact model number of the chipset may be helpful though.

There are numerous people doing drop-ship from DealExtreme with a markup in BTC. The deal a day guy, this store, another electronics store I saw.

It's not a scam - just educated consumers should know they can get the product for less using fiat money at the original source, that's all.

I would not consider this a scam at all. Sure he is reselling, but that's fine. Bottom line, you now have a place to shop for cool products with bitcoins.  I think it's sweet!

he's just doing drop shipping, and cashing off the conversion.

So... Is this a scam? Due to the DX ripoff

I do like the idea of a store accepting bitcoins, however, directly ripping off people by acting as a middleman between DealExtreme and them is not what's needed IMO.

If you compare, for example:

http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/index.php?route=product/product&path=36&product_id=69
and
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/personal-cell-phone-signal-blocker-device-4355

the description and the image is exactly the same as DealExtreme, including the spelling errors ("Perfect for the following senarios", for example). DealExtreme provides also free shipping, and for this example product, if you compare prices, 25.77$ for DealExtreme and 2.2 BTC (~32.2$) for BitCoinz SuperStore, it's quite obvious the store just forwards you products from DealExtreme and charges 25% extra on top of their prices.

I do realize that this saves you the problem of swapping your currency from BTC to USD via MtGox or some other exchange, and removes the exchange fees, but the fees for USD are only .25$ for a withdraw and .3% for a trade, i.e. in this case, for 25.77$, you would pay ~.35$ for the fees. So, for this particular product, the store gets around 6$ per ordered product, not that bad of a profit :p

Just do a search with the exact product names from the BitCoinz SuperStore, and you will notice that they are exactly the same as on DealExtreme...

P. S. It's quite lovely how you couldn't use the large images for example on http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/index.php?route=product/product&path=36&product_id=73, since they have the DealExtreme watermark (http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-mini-cooling-fridge-7340), so you had to use the low resolution small image - does the filename sound familiar? http://www1.dealextreme.com/productimages/sku_7340_1_small.jpg vs http://www.bitcoinz.ca/shop/image/cache/data/gadgets/sku_7340_1_small-140x140.jpg ;p

Hello,

Thank you for your input. We are expanding our products line to include many sources. What you see is just a meager start. We are working very hard to bring low price deals to the BitCoin community. Five new customers today, thank you all for your patronage. Peace.

Andrew

Congrats on your store..not sure we needed another dealextreme + markup in bitcoin dropship site, but meh.

Well, maybe until DX starts taking BTC themselves I guess. 

Best of luck!