I was doing a bit of admin and paperwork today (it's tax return time) and I came across an invoice for some stuff I bought from Adaptec last year. Until now it has not clicked given all the discussion on the General forum on Digital River's appalling performance on behalf of S-B for the car player. However, read on...

I ordered (last year, around July 2000) a copy of E-Z SCSI 5 and the manual for it. According to the invoice, I paid $80 for the software (which I downloaded) and $15 for the paper manual. At the time, I remember being given a list of postal options, and I chose the cheapest, US Mail Priority. In spite of my choice, it actually cost me $54 for postage and it was sent priority courier. Reading the invoice it quite clearly states $6.50 for priority post, yet it still got sent courier, and I got hit for $54 from my credit card. There was no way to call (it had a US-only 800 number, and there is - believe it or not - no address for D-R on the return label!).

Just to really top the story off, what I actually received was Dart Pro 32 software, something I had been intending to buy around that time, which I use to record and clean up my vinyl recordings onto hard disk so I can make CDs (bad ones, I know) and rip them for the empeg. There is a happy ending: the value of Dart Pro 32 at that time was something around $200, so I think I got it reasonably cheap at less than half price. Stuff you, D-R!

So I suspect that this has been going on for a lot longer than just around the time of the Rio online store being brought together; it is notable that Adaptec only used them for around six months and then dropped them in favour of their own commercial e-sales venture, Roxio (which moron thought that one up?).

Shame S-B didn't notice before signing them up and effectively ending sales of the car player. Maybe we'd be looking at the Mk3 player by now

OK, I think this is a first, but I have placed 4 or 5 orders with SonicBlue and all have arrived without incident! I see no evidence of the horror stories I keep reading on this BBS (that's not to say I don't believe them). The only thing I got f'd on was the $300 refund (currently attempting to get that cleared up). Sure, I notice that Empeg ordering and service was more personal and responsive. But, that's to be expected from a very small company.

I'm not ranting or discrediting everyone. I'm just letting people know Digital River actually gets it right sometimes.

robricc: Digital River actually gets it right sometimes.


Well, in part because I'm smart enough to order items that are listed as out of stock, Digital River has also failed to hurt me *lately*. I got the "spare", my lenses and a tuner. 3 for 3 in recent months (emphasis on recent).

However, my perception is that some of these self-selected discussions about vendor/product performance (not just on this BBS) can often obscure just how bad things really are.

For grins I did a little spreadsheet exercise using a pseudo-random function where I took 5000 hypothetical DR single-item orders and matched them up with 1000 hypothetical customers who (using you, myself, and many other folks as an example) each place 5 separate single-item orders.

Allowing DR a per-order success rate of 90%, 680 customers had all 5 orders completed without error (That's you!), but 345 experienced 1 error, 67 experienced 2 and 8 experienced 3 errors.

When I changed the per-order success rate to 75%, there were still 120 customers who, like you, got all 5 items without problems, but fully 411 out of 1000 experienced 1 error, 283 experienced 2 errors, 75 experienced 3 and 12 experienced 4!

OK, OK, the methodology is very crude and imperfect. It is certainly pseudo-random and outcomes are not distributed across all customers (those that ordered 1, 2, 3 or N times or who ordered variable numbers of items per order). Also, I have no real idea of how DR performs on a per-order basis.

Still, I expect this cheap little exercise is somewhat representative and what the exercise reinforces for me is that it is the negative exceptions from good perfomance (and reports of same) that deserve much more attention. Essentially you have to keep your performance/success numbers *much* higher than either of my two scenarios to be be perceived as providing adequate service. As compared to the (relatively small) overall denominator of Empeg owners and, thus, the number of potential orders through DR, the numerator of horror stories, many but not all of them posted on this BBS, is exceptionally high. I would be amazed if DR bats 85%

So, the fact that DR enjoys a dismal reputation is, in my opinion, completely deserved. I really think they need to go belly-up.

I *would* like to get some $500 software package for $200, though, before they go!