Dear VSL,
I love your products, they are the very best! And, I'm sure you are all good people.
BUT, your web site is really really bad. It is difficult to navigate,
very hard to understand, and what's worst of all, your online purchasing
system has always been a very problematic and frustrating experience
for me.
I am appealing to you to take some of that money you are raking in and
spend it on a good, user friendly and "purchasing friendly" web site
that your customers can understand and use easily without all the problems.
I have spent the last three hours of my morning trying to purchase the
upright bass and jazz drums, which I sorely need to work on some
projects. Three hours TOTALLY wasted trying to spend my money on your
web site. This is almost insulting to me.
I have been a web designer, and I know how difficult it can be to create
and maintain a web site like yours. But, you should realize that the
kind of problems I have experienced with The VSL site, are the kind of
things that on most web sites cause them to "lose" business. It happens
all the time.
Granted, VSL has a "monopoly" on it's incredible and outstanding product
line, so people are forced to go through the painful and difficult
process of purchasing on line. But you must be losing some business. You
have almost lost mine.
So, please, please, please, wont you give some serious consideration to
spending the money and have a state of the art , professionally designed
web site built to replace this old dinosaur of a site? I'm sure it
would make your current and future customers very very happy!
yours in faith,
James Schlesselman
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An Open Letter to VSL
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James,
There are things about this site that could be better, but I didn't think purchasing was one of them.
They always get my money. [:)]
I purchased the Upright Bass and Jazz Drums as well as several others and have never had an issue.
Can you share your purchasing experiance?
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I think becasue I am in the USA the credit card transactions never go smoothly. This is the second time I have run in to this. This time I even opened a PayPal accouint and tried that. Still the transaction would not complete. I get to a page that says, "transaction successful. Wait a few moments and you'll recieve a confirmation...." I wait, and wait and wait..... nothing. No confirmation, no bass and drums. It's been over 12 hours now, still no response.
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Having also had troubles purchasing direct with using a credit card on VSL's site, if I need to purchase a download library, I will go through Ilio if at all possible. Ilio is VSL's distributor in the U.S., and buying through them avoids the credit card difficulty (the issue seems to be that since VSL is in Austria, the US credit card transaction gets rejected when trying to buy direct). Another option that generally works when buying direct from VSL is to use Paypal.
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James,
Thank you for your letter and the emails you sent to us regarding your problem.
I'm very sorry to hear of your problem when placing an order in our web shop!We've had a few cases lately where especially American credit cards wouldn't be charged successfully in our web shop, but when charging it in our backoffice it worked perfectly - according to our payment provider this is often due to restrictions for online transactions that some credit card companies have. This means, just like noldar12 said, that some American credit card companies are putting a flag on most transactions from overseas, including Austria.
Contacting your credit card company to announce that there will be a foreign online transaction should solve this issue. Afterwards you will most probably be able to order successfully in our web shop. Please log out and in again on our website for the new order, as this will make sure that you have a fresh order attempt. I'm not sure what the cause of the problem with PayPal is, as this usually helps in cases like this, we'll investigate here.
If the problem persists with paying via credit card, we can then offer you to process your order in our back office as a solution - please check your mailbox for instructions.Lastly I'd like to add that we're in the process of getting a major overhaul for our website, I'm sure you'll like the new one better. :-)
Again, please excuse the inconvenience this issue has caused!Best,
Stefan
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Hi mgr88,
The best idea is to contact our Sales Team directly:
As Stefan explained before, we know how to make purchases work. Alternatively you can also contact your CC company and tell them that you actually really want to purchase a product from an austrian company called "Vienna Symphonic Library" [:)]
Best,
Paul
Paul Kopf Product Manager VSL -
Sorry to add to the length of this thread but I just wanted to share my experience. As of now, I've spent so much time on this site that I know my way around like it's home. I've had no problems purchasing at all (just my experience). But I can still easily remember the first few times I was on here. I had been here plenty of times before but didn't give it attention cause I couldn't navigate too easily and didn't want to invest the time. Once I heard an audio demo, I invested :) But for a first time user the site certainly doesn't have the most inviting layout (Sorry VSL, I still love you. lol).
-Sean
