Play-Asia.com Responds at Resellerrating.com

I’m sure most of you had heard about Play-Asia (my ad banner) by now. They are one of the popular online toys and games merchant at Hong Kong. I buy quite a lot of trading figures, plush dolls, solar gadgets and PC games from them in the past. And so I decided to leave my personal review on Resellerratings.com because they pays attentions and monitors the feedbacks every week from the customers.

I, myself also experience some problems in the past and I really couldn’t forget getting a wrong figure. It was USD$65.00 that time and I was totally pissed off at them not responding my email for three days at least. It was really unforgettable hatred in my life. I encourage unhappy buyers to post your unhappy experience and complain over at the Resellerratings.com website. I just got mine yesterday so you can read here that responds to my previous review.

Dear Chong,
I just read your review and if you don't mind would like to respond to a few points on behalf of our company.
Customer feedback is very important for us, and that we participate at Reselleratings.com has basically the reason that it gives us a better opportunity to improve our operations, by learning from our customers.
It is of course sad to hear that you previously had problems with our customer service. Regarding the point, that we deliver orders to fast, instead of holding them to clarify things with a customer:  most of our customer seem to want their goods as fast as possible. That’s why we often do partial shipments for airmail orders and generally try to ship out orders as fast as possible.
In general we do have a 24h email policy. During the week (Monday-Friday), every email should be answered within 24h. Usually we always reach this quota, only in very special situations (before Christmas or if technical problems occur) it might take a bit longer.
So your cancelations by email should also be confirmed within 24 hours.
Regarding the pre-orders. As far as I see you use most of the time PayPal to pay your orders. PayPal is a pre-payment method, similar to a bank transfer. A PayPal payment is always done at the moment you place your order.
With credit cards, we really do only charge the order after the parcel is packed for shipping. What often leads to confusion with customers, is that we do a so called "online authorization", when we receive the order. This is a temporary blockage of funds, similar to what hotels do upon check-in.
If your pre-order is expected to be shipped not within the next week, we would do a test-authorization over US$, if your order is anticipated within the next few days, we would authorize the full amount, to be later able to charge the card.
This authorization is temporary and will disappear within 1-2 weeks (depending on the credit card issuing bank), if there is no charge.
Unfortunately many banks display online authorizations like a charge in their online-banking tools. This is a general problem, that often leads to confusion.
Anyway, really can assure you, that we do not charge credit cards before the parcel is ready to be shipped out.
Regarding the price issues with toys: unfortunately it is difficult for us to get the same conditions that Japanese stores get. Many goods we have to buy from Japan and on top of our buying price we also have to pay for the shipping from Japan to Hong Kong.
Of course we would prefer to be always able to offer the best prices, but unfortunately that is not always possible.
I hope I could help you a bit to understand our side of the matters.
With best regards from Hong Kong
Fabian Gruber
General Manager