foz
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happyvalleycameras.com
- Thread starter foz
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surfinrach90
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Can't say I have but the prices on there seems to be decent. I've bookmarked it ready for when I can afford some new lenses!
Hi
My name is Andy and I am the UK side of Happy Valley Cameras. I have a live analytics suite set up on the site so I can see where all the traffic is coming from in real time which is when I noticed some traffic coming from this site.
I thought it might be helpful to share some information about us and about the market place in general at the moment to see if I can answer some questions you might have.
Happy Valley Cameras are a Hong Kong electronics internet retailer previously known as Octopus Electronics, if you Google our UK address I am sure Octo will show up somewhere.
We had to shut down at the end of last year due to 3 main issues.
1. Paypal imposed a rolling reserve of 10% for 90days on all transactions, this basically destroyed cashflow. The reserve has been imposed on all merchants large and small, despite very good ebay feedback and good reviews on forums and review sites we were unable to get this lifted.
2. Market saturation, a lot of one man band operations showed up with rock bottom prices. These guys were selling for 0.5% profit in the end which was unsustainable. They have since not surprisingly disappeared.
3. The £ crashed and UK merchant prices were still at high £ prices. This meant UK prices were only 5-10% higher compared to direct imports.
After evaluating these issues I personally put a hold on my business relationship and decided to re brand Octopus Electronics as a UK supplier, I opened trade accounts with all the major UK distributors of cameras, TVs, home appliances, computers, etc etc and uploaded all listings onto the site and set about marketing. Unfortunately it became clear that there is no way anyone new can enter the UK market with the prices offered unless they have £10m+ to spend, Tamron offered trade prices higher than Warehouse Express retail prices, and Sigma wanted £2m+ worth of trade, with a similar story from Nikon.
Therefore to avoid confusion when I continued my business relationship we decided to use another domain name, one which has a more honest name and is more suited to our product range.
The deal is the same as was with Octopus, I look after the marketing and customer service and my business partner deal with the Asian distributors and the logistics. We offer the same no VAT or Duty guarantee that One Stop Digital does, and we are trying to give our customers great prices. This does sometimes mean delivery takes about a week though because we are using a different payment processor which has different/slower payout schedules to Paypal, but it has lower fees meaning better prices for you so hopefully you don't mind. We can also offer 2% discount if you pay via bank transfer as this avoids all processor fees.
Hopefully this answers any questions you have, and I have tried not to be too self promoting. I think it is very important to manage our reputation especially in respected forums such as this one. If you have any other questions feel free to ask.
Regards
Andy
My name is Andy and I am the UK side of Happy Valley Cameras. I have a live analytics suite set up on the site so I can see where all the traffic is coming from in real time which is when I noticed some traffic coming from this site.
I thought it might be helpful to share some information about us and about the market place in general at the moment to see if I can answer some questions you might have.
Happy Valley Cameras are a Hong Kong electronics internet retailer previously known as Octopus Electronics, if you Google our UK address I am sure Octo will show up somewhere.
We had to shut down at the end of last year due to 3 main issues.
1. Paypal imposed a rolling reserve of 10% for 90days on all transactions, this basically destroyed cashflow. The reserve has been imposed on all merchants large and small, despite very good ebay feedback and good reviews on forums and review sites we were unable to get this lifted.
2. Market saturation, a lot of one man band operations showed up with rock bottom prices. These guys were selling for 0.5% profit in the end which was unsustainable. They have since not surprisingly disappeared.
3. The £ crashed and UK merchant prices were still at high £ prices. This meant UK prices were only 5-10% higher compared to direct imports.
After evaluating these issues I personally put a hold on my business relationship and decided to re brand Octopus Electronics as a UK supplier, I opened trade accounts with all the major UK distributors of cameras, TVs, home appliances, computers, etc etc and uploaded all listings onto the site and set about marketing. Unfortunately it became clear that there is no way anyone new can enter the UK market with the prices offered unless they have £10m+ to spend, Tamron offered trade prices higher than Warehouse Express retail prices, and Sigma wanted £2m+ worth of trade, with a similar story from Nikon.
Therefore to avoid confusion when I continued my business relationship we decided to use another domain name, one which has a more honest name and is more suited to our product range.
The deal is the same as was with Octopus, I look after the marketing and customer service and my business partner deal with the Asian distributors and the logistics. We offer the same no VAT or Duty guarantee that One Stop Digital does, and we are trying to give our customers great prices. This does sometimes mean delivery takes about a week though because we are using a different payment processor which has different/slower payout schedules to Paypal, but it has lower fees meaning better prices for you so hopefully you don't mind. We can also offer 2% discount if you pay via bank transfer as this avoids all processor fees.
Hopefully this answers any questions you have, and I have tried not to be too self promoting. I think it is very important to manage our reputation especially in respected forums such as this one. If you have any other questions feel free to ask.
Regards
Andy
micloi
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In one of your pages on the website you praise Paypal whereas you do not use it at all, may I ask why that is?
"Lets talk about money.
PayPal is designed from the ground up to be a safer way to send money online. PayPal doesn’t expose your financial information to merchants and that information is automatically sent with a high level of data encryption.
Paypal is great, we know not every one has it but the charges are much lower than if we were to put the usual card payment systerm in. This means we dont have to put those charges onto the product prices. So we can get pretty darn close to the COST PRICE from Hong Kong."
"Lets talk about money.
PayPal is designed from the ground up to be a safer way to send money online. PayPal doesn’t expose your financial information to merchants and that information is automatically sent with a high level of data encryption.
Paypal is great, we know not every one has it but the charges are much lower than if we were to put the usual card payment systerm in. This means we dont have to put those charges onto the product prices. So we can get pretty darn close to the COST PRICE from Hong Kong."
Ah yes, I will change that now.
We use Moneybookers because of lower transaction fees, better chargeback protection against scammers and Paypal are generally the most unpleasant people to deal with in the world. Moneybookers customer service is much better, although if we have to make a refund they keep the original transaction fee. Eg we pay about £10 on £500 transaction, if we have to refund we are down £10.
If you go here you will see why very few etailers want to use Paypal now, a friend of mine runs one of the largest HDMI cable websites in the UK and he had a reserve of £25k put on his account... Their security is also very poor if your using Internet Explorer.
One thing I forgot to mention earlier is Moneybookers give all merchants a £650 transaction limit. We have requested this be lifted and are in the process of getting this raised.
EDIT: I have just got of the phone to Moneybookers again, they have informed us that if our customers want to pay more than €1000/£650 they have to create an account with Moneybookers and verify their card. This only takes 2 minutes and involves basically adding your card to your account and making a test payment.
We use Moneybookers because of lower transaction fees, better chargeback protection against scammers and Paypal are generally the most unpleasant people to deal with in the world. Moneybookers customer service is much better, although if we have to make a refund they keep the original transaction fee. Eg we pay about £10 on £500 transaction, if we have to refund we are down £10.
If you go here you will see why very few etailers want to use Paypal now, a friend of mine runs one of the largest HDMI cable websites in the UK and he had a reserve of £25k put on his account... Their security is also very poor if your using Internet Explorer.
One thing I forgot to mention earlier is Moneybookers give all merchants a £650 transaction limit. We have requested this be lifted and are in the process of getting this raised.
EDIT: I have just got of the phone to Moneybookers again, they have informed us that if our customers want to pay more than €1000/£650 they have to create an account with Moneybookers and verify their card. This only takes 2 minutes and involves basically adding your card to your account and making a test payment.
Last edited:
puddleduck
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- Andy Drake
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Yes, I use VOIP. This means, I can answer phone calls from anywhere with mobile phone signal. When mulitasking for the iPhone comes along you will be able to get a hold of me anytime of the day or night. At the moment if I am not signed you are redirected to voicemail.
