US-centric sales policy?
marble
Posts: 7,500
in The Commons
Every morning I look in my email inbox and find notifications of flash sales. Unfortunately, these began and ended while I slept. This is an ongoing issue for non-US customers. I guess our money isn't good enough for DAZ even though it goes into their coffers as US$.
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Oh it gets better. Today they launched an SMS service in the US and you get a free item for signing up. It doesn't feel like they are thinking these things through.
I suppose they hoped nobody outside the US would find out about it, but the sale didn't work, as is often the case, people went of the forum, so now I know Americans were given one of my wishlist items.
I saw a recent comment suggesting that DAZ might be moving to Canada. Maybe wild speculation but if true then they might finally realise that there is human life beyond the US borders? Thankfully I don't deal with many (any?) other US companies directly but I am led to understand that this is a common complaint from people who do.
My understanding from that thread is not that they are moving to Canada, but they are opening a second office in Canada (specifically Vancouver, which is basically north Washington).
Ah well, same point applies.
By the way, I know where Washington state is. In fact I know where every US state is and could name them all on a map. Even in my lowly, poorly financed British state school in the 1960s, North American geography and history was on the curriculum.
OK, I just read the thread on the SMS promotion and saw your remarks. A bit of coincidental overlap here so sorry - didn't mean to steal your thunder.
How about this, you got any suggestions on how they can cater to a different time zone with the office/staff they have now? Probably more helpful to contact DAZ themselves and let them know the issue since complaining in the forums probably won't get any results.
I would gather they have already thought about various ways to cater to the different times zones since they should be able to see where there customers are and someone from the none US times zones complains at least once a week. I would also gather that if they had a solution, they would have implemented it by now, so maybe they haven't found one yet.
Have you ever tried making a suggestion via the "normal channels". Does the expression "bit bucket" still exist? Or "File 13"?
Here's a suggestion: 24 hour Flash Sales.
Or 90%off flash sale starting at 2AM DAZ Time
I guess the "normal channels" would be flooded with complaints if that happened.
Ah, the good old flash sales...
i started a thread about this a while back, and although I am not happy about today's little stunt, I feel I should say that in the past, this was frakly ridiculous, and nowadays, things are better. There are sometimes sales that the US would not get which would never have happened in the past. I have not kept track as actively lately, although I have a feeling that the US and those that share its timezones, is getting a lot more PA sales, and the "Europe" sales are mostly offers for the same Daz Original items, but that, as I said, is just a feeling. I haven't felt enough interest to gather the stats because it's something that takes quite a while to do.
Other suggestions were repeating the same sale at 12 hour intervals, something the competition does.
Anyway, here is the thread. It got quite long...
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/545436/flash-sales-as-long-as-you-don-t-live-in-europe/p1
So in summary, it is better than it was, but I am fearful we are about to see Americans being texted a daily offers available only to them. Maybe it won't happen, but already, I know that they were given a free item and texted a bunch of offers. The fact that they don't work isn't relevant. Daz only advertised the offers, and attempted to make the offers available only in the US.
Your point about endlessly repeating DO sales is something that I noticed too. Different day, different sale, same content.
I'm not in Europe now (I'm living in New Zealand) so it is not as bad as when I lived in the UK for missing short-lived sales. Nevertheless, I often see a flash sale advertised and it has ended before my wake-up time.
Sorry, I didn't read the above. I know these things don't always come across as intented, but one interpretation is that this is something we should all just put up with, and stop writing about on the forum. Let me repond with some observations and suggestions. And FWIW, I did contact Daz.
- Daz rolls out new promotions every day at midnnight their time. It is unlikely they need someone in the office to do that. Computers are quite good at doing things at pre-scheduled times, so I don't think a staff presence is at all relevant.
- Do you see complaints like this on the Rendo forum? I can't imagine they have access to more resources, and yet it doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
- One solution is to not do flash sales.
- Another is to make them longer.
- Another is to repeat them at 12 hour intervals so eveyone gets a chance, the solution Rendo employs.
- Another is to run them at all hours of the day. They can run the same number of sales but spread out, which would not increase the workload, or they can run more sales.
I'm sure there are more. But I don't think this is as bad as it was. They have demonstrated they can make it fair, so if they don't do it now, the reason is probably they don't want to.
Really all Daz needs to do to resolve the issue with flash sales is create a database of regions on the backend and have the flash sales start for IP addresses from each of those regions at a set time. If they setup the first flash sale to always happen during the US/Canada region then they will be in the office to fix any bugs with the sale so when it goes live in the other regions the bugs are already resolved.
I wouldn't want to miss out on the occasional offer with HD upgrades or the characters so I use what I call the "Mr Banks" test. If the first item in a DO flash sale is Mr Banks hair, I look no further!
...I was hoping with this that Daz "zero Hour" would be moved to the Pacific Time Zone.
Shortly after the thread I saw on this (which was closed) the last flash sale of the day ended an hour earlier at 22:59 (instead of 23:59) Utah time (which here is 21:59, In Alaska: 19:59, and in Hawai'i: 18:59).
Works for me! There is definitely nothing left in that list that I want!
I agree with at least some of this. I am at the point of not even opening the DO sales because I know exactly what will be on offer. Same as yesterday. Same as last week. Same as a month ago. DAZ seem to need a constant advertising cycle of "new" sales (which aren't new at all, of course) and they risk buyer fatigue. As you say, if I didn't buy yesterday, last week or last month, I will not buy today. Only sometimes a Flash Sale has something I might buy so it is all the more galling to find that the sale began and ended during my night.
I like that soultion. The sales would all be working when they reached us! Perfect... as long as they aren't all the same sale, day in, day out
In general, the only flash sales of interest are the PA ones, and the DO ones with HD items or core characters. I don't think there are any DO items apart from those I want.
The most money I spent here ever, was probably when they first made the flash sales fair and we started to get then at 7 AM (GMT) running through the day, and they were good, PA offers. I got 10 characters for $40 in one of them, and I thought to myself, this is what it must be like in the US all the time. Then, it stopped as quickly as it started (maybe not such a bad thing!), then we had the March Madness that wasn't mad (again, maybe not such a bad thing!), and then my PC broke. That was a bad thing...
I belive the last time I spent freely and wiped out more than my budget was last October. Since then all the sales have been underwhelming. I bought two dresses recently and they were both non-dForce. I don't mind adding dForce but these two refused to simulate despite my best efforts (I'm no expert on dForce but I can usually make a conforming item simulate reasonably well after adding dForce). So those two items have refund requests.
While I appreciate the frustration, being in the UK, this doesn't really need a second thread.