Help us find JOE69

[Mux213]

jjoeworks,

Auch, man thats gotta suck....

sakaito (and all others),

Well we always need to keep in the back of our heads that something really shitty might have happened to joe that caused him to get into trouble and as a result, his customers. Not all people do bad things because they are bad people. Thats the real problem with forums and international deals, on one side the anomisity makes it relatively easy to get conned, on the other side it also makes it very hard to judge when someone is telling truth and the problems aren't his/her fault to begin with.

Having run a shop together with Art for the past year has made it all to clear how ill suited shipping companies and local governments are towards small international businesses as ourselves. There simply are no guarantees, international tracking is a laugh, and unless you ship with DHL and the likes and pay shipping that is 10x more expensive then the part your shipping, there simply is no way to be sure you can find out where a package ended up when it doesn't arrive at its destination.
And often I've found out its not even the shipping company that is at fault.

I once spend 2 months, 2 MONTHS waiting for a package that was AIR shipped (i.e. overnight delivery). It was posted in the US, flew to Amsterdam airport the next day, delivered at customs, spend 2 months on a shelf at customs, and finally ended up at my door. Countless of inquiries from both ends to where my package was did not do ANY good, nobody knew where it was.

In the end, tracking is only good to confirm that something has arrived, not to figure out when things go amiss, and in that way only protects the supplier from being conned themselves. It does very little for the buyer. (well some shipping companies do a good job. TNT used to have a pretty good tracking site depending on where you ship, but its gotten worse).

That all does mean that the financial risk is potentialy stagering. High priced goods with high priced shipping can go lost without any explanation. With small businesses like joe's, it only takes one or two of these going wrong to be financially ruined especially if you do not calculate this risk into your pricing.
It is in the end, not your customers problem if parts go missing, though as a supplier you have to always be mindfull of a customer conning your out of a free product, in the end you can not have your customer pay for a product they do not receive.

This sometimes means not giving a customer the choice over the cheapest shipping method simply because the cheapest shipping method puts yourself at the highest risk or making sure the customer knows that if the shipment gets lost, and they haven't opted for the insurance and tracking, sorry but thats no refund.

That last one I've seen come past a few times on the board and other boards, where parts have indeed been lost, probably stolen off the docs by some ill tempered handlers, customers getting upset, and shouting at a supplier for conning them out of their money, while in reality it was their own greed and unwillingness to pay an additional 50 or 100 dollars of shipping to get a big packet of expensive goodies send half way around the world.
Just think about it, 50 dollars worth of gas doesn't get you out of your country, heck depending on where you live it might not even get you out of your state! (well depending on where you live, gas might actually be that cheap, but I think I made my point).

Anyways, two points I'm trying to make here:
1) Joe could be a conmen, or simply a supplier who did honest business until a couple of deals went wrong and he never properly solved these problems and kept on going where he should have stopped. The net result is the same, alot of unhappy customers, but in my eyes it does make a difference between whether he's a bad person who I wish all the bad things in the world to, or someone who ran out of luck who I would offer a helping hand no matter how much he fucked things up
2) As customers, realize that getting the cheapest deals, be it through suppliers on the forum, through ebay, or whatnot, choosing the cheapest shipping, may not be your best option. Even when buying from the best supplier out there, if you're not willing to pay for relyable shipping, you're not going to get relyable shipping and it simply isn't fair to the supplier to ruin his/her reputation for your unwillingness to spend money. Sure you can blame the supplier for offering you the cheaper shipping, but you know perfectly well that you asked him for it, and that if he didn't, you would have bought from the other guy that did.

That all said, Joe making bad deals towards fellow Malaysians does not bode well for his case. There are no real shipping issues there, if needs be he could drop the goods off personally. Only if he already got into enough financial trouble through international problems.....

Owh and just to make sure, I don't know Joe, I never did business with him, and I have no idea whats going on here. The above is purely my general opinion based on my 4 years experienced running this board and seeing many suppliers come and go. I'm not trying to defend Joe, but I've learned never to take things on face value.