How Digital Planet can improve?

K

Karyn

Digital Planet Representative
Joined
Apr 23, 2008
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Work in Bryanston
Hi there,

My name is Karyn Lovesay and I am the General Manager of Digital Planet. I am going on my 6th year with Digital Planet and I really love the excitement of working for such a young and dynamic company.

As you know there are quite a few complaints about Digital Planet on this forum. I am here to ask anybody who has purchased from us in the last year to please post your complaints, compliments and general feedback through to this thread. If you would prefer to email me directly then please do so on [email protected].

I would love to hear your feedback and all feedback is valuable to me.

I look forward to hearing from you :)

Thanks and Regards,
Karyn
 
Good move Karyn. Well done. I admire your courage to open up this channel to us, so that we can help you improve. There are few other companies on this forum who could learn from what you are doing.

I hope the feedback is constructive.
 
Good idea this...

I have never bought anything from DP, mainly due to the bad press the site has got, mainly on these forums.
 
Karyn (GM Digital Planet) said:
Hi there,

My name is Karyn Lovesay and I am the General Manager of Digital Planet. I am going on my 6th year with Digital Planet and I really love the excitement of working for such a young and dynamic company.

As you know there are quite a few complaints about Digital Planet on this forum. I am here to ask anybody who has purchased from us in the last year to please post your complaints, compliments and general feedback through to this thread. If you would prefer to email me directly then please do so on [email protected].

I would love to hear your feedback and all feedback is valuable to me.

I look forward to hearing from you :)

Thanks and Regards,
Karyn
Click to expand...

How about offering specials specific to MyBB members and treat them with some priority channel?
 
I myself have bought from Digital Planet a couple of times.

Once, I bought Guild-Wars: Factions, and there was a special running on Battlefield 2142 where you gave a free T-shirt with every copy purchased.

In the order notes I asked whether I could maybe have a free T-shirt as well, which DP sent to me!
I've been gymming with it ever since.

The bad publicity DP got was mainly due to a badly maintained website, where users could order, and pay for an item, only to discover it was out-of-stock. They then had to wait a long while for the actual item, or had to get a refund.
The reason for this was :
[*] DP having a HUGE range of items. (Which is actually a very good thing)
[*] The website wasn't maintained up to standard. (When an item went "out-of-stock" it's online status wasn't changed to reflect that)
[*] Old content on the website could still be accessed. (I once bought a
Belkin Nostromo N52 for a ridiculously cheap R180, after googling nostromo's, only to find out the special price expired about 2 months prior.)
 
Reply

I am Penguin said:
How about offering specials specific to MyBB members and treat them with some priority channel?
Click to expand...
Hi Penguin,

I think that is a great idea! We are meeting with mybroadband on Monday to discuss opportunities. I will send feedback next week.

Thanks
Karyn
 
My suggestions:

1) Improve your search function. A customer should be able to search by category e.g. games, software etc. In a particular search category there should be more sub-categories e.g. PS2 Games in Games.

2) Improve the loading time of pages by removing junk. This will also save on bandwidth costs. Is it really necessary to have all the brand icons on the home page. The homepage has 126 HTTP objects for a total of 385KB. This is absurd...
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://www.digitalplanet.co.za/default.aspx

3) Get the following books for the developer team library:
High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization

4) Make sure that items that will take longer than 2 weeks to deliver have a note to inform the customer on the product page. There is nothing worse than seeing something that is stated as 1 week delivery which then takes 4 weeks in the end.

5) Make sure your products are competitively priced. Sometimes the other online computer shops are much cheaper.

6) The search function generally sucks. It will bring up the strangest results and the customer will go and look somewhere else after a minute or two.
 
Last edited:
Reply

Frag said:
I myself have bought from Digital Planet a couple of times.

Once, I bought Guild-Wars: Factions, and there was a special running on Battlefield 2142 where you gave a free T-shirt with every copy purchased.

In the order notes I asked whether I could maybe have a free T-shirt as well, which DP sent to me!
I've been gymming with it ever since.

The bad publicity DP got was mainly due to a badly maintained website, where users could order, and pay for an item, only to discover it was out-of-stock. They then had to wait a long while for the actual item, or had to get a refund.
The reason for this was :
[*] DP having a HUGE range of items. (Which is actually a very good thing)
[*] The website wasn't maintained up to standard. (When an item went "out-of-stock" it's online status wasn't changed to reflect that)
[*] Old content on the website could still be accessed. (I once bought a
Belkin Nostromo N52 for a ridiculously cheap R180, after googling nostromo's, only to find out the special price expired about 2 months prior.)
Click to expand...
Hi Frag,

Thank you for your feedback. I am very glad to hear that you are gymming in your T-shirt that you received from us. I also have a few that I gym in:)

You are absolutely correct in saying that we had far too many products on our website and it was a nightmare to maintain. In the last year we cut our product range down from 10 000 products to 3900 (this has increased to about +/- 4000 this year). We have also got most of our suppliers on board sending us weekly or monthly stock updates. This helps reduce the amount of products on the site that are out of stock as well as the amount of backorders.

Unfortunately you will always get your cases where suppliers aren't able to send stocklists through to us in time or they get a large order and the stock goes in one day. I know that this is really frustrating and I am trying my best to manage the situation. We have a really efficient call centre team who will source you an alternative to your order if there is no stock.

I hope that this sheds some light on the situation. Myself and the Digital Planet team are constantly working on these things and there are huge improvements so far. It's not 100% yet, but I am hoping to get close to that :)

Kind Regards,
Karyn
 
Reply

Franna said:
My suggestions:

1) Improve your search function. A customer should be able to search by category e.g. games, software etc. In a particular search category there should be more sub-categories e.g. PS2 Games in Games.

2) Improve the loading time of pages by removing junk. This will also save on bandwidth costs. Is it really necessary to have all the brand icons on the home page. The homepage has 126 HTTP objects for a total of 385KB. This is absurd...
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://www.digitalplanet.co.za/default.aspx

3) Get the following books for the developer team library:
High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization

4) Make sure that items that will take longer than 2 weeks to deliver have a note to inform the customer on the product page. There is nothing worse than seeing something that is stated as 1 week delivery which then takes 4 weeks in the end.

5) Make sure your products are competitively priced. Sometimes the other online computer shops are much cheaper.

6) The search function generally sucks. It will bring up the strangest results and the customer will go and look somewhere else after a minute or two.
Click to expand...

Hi Franna,

We recently loaded a new search system onto our site and I am sorry to hear that it is not working up to standard. I have forwarded your comments onto our Developer team in order for us to discuss this. Thank you for letting me know!

When you say brand icons, are you referring to the brand stores on the left hand side of the website? These stores are a marketing tool for our top brands and the thought behind it is to make it easier for the customer to see the brand and click on it than to search manually through the site. Have you clicked on one of the brand stores? We are updating the look and feel of it – please take a look and let me know what you think?

I agree that items should be competitive, however, you will always get a new online store with no reputation that will come in at either very low or no margin just to get the clients. Unfortunately I don’t feel that we should compete with small guys like that as it would be bad for our business in the long run. What are your thoughts?

Thank you once again for your feedback.

Kind Regards,
Karyn
 
Hi Karyn,

Welcome to the forums :)

I decided to go over to the digitalplanet website now just to see how much has changed since last time I was there, was on for about 10 seconds and I'm already a lil confused. If you go through the menu under computing\computer components then cpus/processors it brings up motherboards at the top with the community suggestion thing and then nothing else?

http://www.digitalplanet.co.za/c-119-cpuprocessors.aspx

Is this right? cause iburst in joburg this 1st week has been having problems loading pages etc so it could also be my side.
 
Wife bought me a couple gadget thingies a year ago and delivery was nice and prompt (1 week when 1 week was stated) so I haven't got any complaints there.

Only thing I suggest is to maybe up the selection of products a bit. Like under laptops, a few with wuxga screens would be nice.
 
Frag said:
The bad publicity DP got was mainly due to a badly maintained website, where users could order, and pay for an item, only to discover it was out-of-stock. They then had to wait a long while for the actual item, or had to get a refund.
The reason for this was :
[*] DP having a HUGE range of items. (Which is actually a very good thing)
[*] The website wasn't maintained up to standard. (When an item went "out-of-stock" it's online status wasn't changed to reflect that)
[*] Old content on the website could still be accessed. (I once bought a
Belkin Nostromo N52 for a ridiculously cheap R180, after googling nostromo's, only to find out the special price expired about 2 months prior.)
Click to expand...
I have bought from them a few times (long ago) before a bad experience. Since then I've not only avoided the place like the plague, I've advised others to follow suit.

What was the bad experience you may ask?
First off the extreme arrogance of the DP salesperson/operator to shout at me and tell me I owed them money for goods I received months ago.
They don't ship without payment so I paid for, and got that specific order - which had nothing to do with the order I called about.
The enquiry was for an item that was out of stock and I wanted a refund. I never got my money (ebucks) back and that was the last time I did business with them.

Fool me once shame on you...fool me twice, shame on me :mad:
 
I think answering simple e-mail queries within a week would be my suggestion. I usually give up and go somewhere else after that.
 
Seagate 400GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3Gb/s NCQ Hard-Drive R 1,467.20 incl VAT

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3GB/SEC NCQ 750GB Hard Drive R 1,419.00 incl VAT

Smaller drive more expensive?
 
Hi Karyn,

This is again based on experience of a few years ago (see the other thread), but I'll offer you the following:

1. Communication
2. Communication
3. Communication

Really, my experience the last time, waiting days for an e-mail reply when the issue was that DP had already screwed up, does not make me want to come back. Ever. You can be more expensive than anyone, but if you offer excellent service, people will come back. The company I work for (US based company, UK office) is the most expensive in the industry, but depsite the economic problems and all our competitors laying off employees, we're still hiring like there's more tomorrow, turning a profit, and growing our business. Why can we do this? Because our service level is vastly superior to anyone else in the industry.

One more thing (and again, this is purely based on my experience with DP of a few years ago): when I went to your offices, the attitude I was treated with by every person I spoke to, was as if I had just ruined their afternoon nap: irritated, disinterested, and generally unfriendly. Some basic friendlyness and a helpful attitude goes a long way.
 
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