Ziggy’s Warehouse

Happy 2007

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Welcome to 2007. Last year I was rather quiet here. But that is changing as we ready and exciting new line for 2007.
Unfortunately with the worldwide increase in spam over the last 6 months, our customer service email address changed. Unfortunately we discovered many automatic emails were still going out with the old email address.
If you’ve send us an email and have not heard from us, please try again. We’ve just deleted 6,000 spam messages to our old customer service address and a few of them may have been legitimate.

Some days it feels like all I do is fix problems and they have nothing to do with providing cool products and hot service. And today it feels like the only time I update our fans is when we have problems.

My 2007 New Year’s Resolution is to update this blog twice a month so you know what we’re up to.

Ziggy’s Warehouse never sends unsolicited email, I hate spam too.

Regards

Paul

Google giveth and Google taketh away

I occassionally check the Google pagerank of this site. If you don’t know what that is then the rest of this entry is not very interesting. It’s been as high as 4 but regularly drops to 0. The first time it happened my heart sank. “What have we done wrong?” I thought.

I think the various changes to the layout and catalog have not helped. As an online retailer we have to tinker and get things working optimally.

After a few times I stopped worrying about it. Either we have good pagerank or we don’t. As long as we provide good service our customers will keep coming back.

Spring update

We’ve moved our warehouse and our offices over August.

I’m sorry to say it broke lots of our systems. We’ve really made a mess of things. Our web forms stopped sending emails to us. Many of our email addresses just stopped working.

The warehouse order processing system also broke. That means accounts processed some orders that were not dispatched in our normal timely manner.

I was even locked out of the system that lets me make these updates.

The end result is if you have placed an order but not received an email every 48 hours until delivery, it probably means your order was affected by our moving chaos.

I really apologise for this. If you want to cancel your order just email or comment here with your order number.

Let me know by either commenting here or sending an email - all our email addresses should be working again.

Live 8 List

I forgot to mention, please add your name to the Live 8 List to petition the G8 and other world leaders.

Actually here’s the text of the petition.

TO:

The 8 most powerful leaders in the world

50,000 people are dying, needlessly, every day of extreme poverty.

At this year’s G8 summit meeting, it is within your power to put an end to this tragedy. It is an extraordinary opportunity which it would be shameful to ignore. We urge you to take these 3 steps to make extreme poverty history…

1. double the aid sent to the world’s poorest countries,
2. fully cancel their debts,
3. change the trade laws so that they can build their own future.

Watch Live 8 now

30,000 children die every day in Africe because of poverty. We’re hoping you’ve seen something about the global awareness concert Bob Geldolf, Bono and some friends have put together. If you were wondering it’s called Live 8.

It’s on Fox 8 right now. You can also watch Live 8 Live on the internet.

While this has nothing to do with Ziggy’s Warehouse, we are part of the community and so believe in using resources to give back.

Surely forgiving the debt of the poorest countries in the world would make the world a better place. Please comment below if you agree or disagree. I guess I’m asking should small businesses make global social and political stands? Remember you can ask for your to not be published.

Negotiating new products

I’ve been busy negotiating distribution rights to a vast range of new products and services. I can’t talk about them until the deals are signed, but watch this space over the next week. I’m so excited about them. It looks like we’ll add about 1,000 new items over the next two or three weeks.

Freight Options

I was ordering some computer network components for a friend today. The Australian website I was using included a reminder during checkout to add the freight item in. It was quite clever, I got to pick and chose from all their freight options as if they were another product in their catalogue. While it seemed a bit cumbersome I realised that maybe I needed to do something similar for Ziggy’s.

You see, freight in this big land of ours is very inefficient. We recently filled an order from country NSW that weighed over 200kg. Yes it was a nice large order. Thank goodness because it cost us $50 more than our estimate in freight. We didn’t charge for the extra freight and were glad the customer trusted us with their business.

However if I built our checkout system with all the freight options there would be 20 or so buttons at the end of your order just to figure how to send it out.

What do you think about freight being a product category all its own. You can then ick and choose from a very extensive list? Either comment below or send an email

2005 starts with a bang

Happy New Year!

Wow what a busy Christmas trading period. I haven’t had a chance to keep this news page updated. But I’ve just got back from holidays today. Actually I could have enjoyed a few more weeks but the kids went back to school and they wanted to see their friends.

I’ve had a few calls asking when we’ll resume our warehouse sale. As an online business our warehouse is not normally open to the public. We may open again for Easter or Mothers Day, it depends on how busy we get with our online store. Opening the warehouse takes a lot of effort. In any case we’ll announce any warehouse sales here.

Warehouse Sale Nov 04

Update 2005 we no longer have that warehouse or phone number, so please don’t visit or call. We’re strictly online now.
Ziggy’s Warehouse is having a warehouse sale. We’re open to the public from 12noon to 6pm Thurdays and Fridays plus 9:30am to 1:30pm on Saturdays in November. Mondays to Wednesdays we may or may not be open depending on delivery schedules and the weather.

We’re at Unit 2, 13 Stennett Road, Ingleburn NSW (enter from Moorelands Road)

If you have any questions call us on 02 9605 6204. Leave a voicemail message if we can’t answer in time - we’re often serving customers.

Freight Rate Review

Ziggy’s Warehouse online store has a freight calculation module that calculates freight for anywhere in Australia. That is quite complex given we stock everything from 200 gram Winnie the Pooh Stickers Sets in our Stickers and Stationery section, to 16kg 3 piece Trolley Luggage sets in our Luggage section.

I’d like to offer free shipping on orders over $150. I’d also like to offer a flat rate shipping method on orders below $150. But may be harder to work out. What do you all think? Comment below (comments will remain private and invisible other users) or you can email.