Ordering from Rosebikes

A few years ago I had a bad experience with an order from a German online store, bike24 (since then I bough a running shoe from them and had no problems) and now I tried ordering from another store from the same country. This order from rosebikes was interesting to :)

I had two packages on route to me, one had tracking, the other didn't. So one day I got an email that they couldn't deliver one of the packages and it got back to the store. I explained that the package was probably not sent because it had no tracking and asked them to send it again. I got the package after a few days.

They speak very poor English, I asked for a tracking number and couldn't get a link. Luckily they have a very good country manager, Alex Ciocan and if you have any problems you can contact him and he is very helpful.

For the next order I will be extra careful to chose UPS for the shipping because the package that was shipped with them had tracking and arrived in time.

Two good thing about this order:

• they have sent a super cool bag as a new customer gift

• the boxes are also super cool so I will be keeping them for storage

Rosebikes have very competitive prices so I'll be ordering from them in the future again :)

Bike24 review

Even a negative review is good commercial. 

I was in Berlin last year so I thought that I should order some stuff online because the shipping is cheaper. I wanted to buy some tires and some other small stuff. I knew bike24.com  has good prices so I placed my order. I calculated that my package would arrive a few days before I had to leave. Everything was ok and the package arrived very fast in Berlin. It was in the city for a few days but they didn't deliver it and I had to leave. I asked somebody to send the package for me to Romania. I don't know what happened next because I wasn't there, it is possible that the package couldn't be delivered or somebody refused to take my package. This happened to me once in th US also.

The fun begun after that... When I saw that the package was returned I wrote an email and asked bike24 to send  my  package to Romania. They asked for my address and they said that they can send my stuff. The problem was that they couldn't just charge me for the shipping, they wanted to charge me for a new order. They didn't refund my money so I didn't have enough money on my credit card so my order was dropped just like that. I complained  but nothing happened. I got my money back in a few days but they never responded to my email. When I complained in the US because I thought that my order wasn't delivered in time they refunded the shipping costs because they didn't want to loose a client.

I already lost some money on the refund because the bank had to convert ron to euro and then euro to ron so I thought I should find some people to join me so we can split the shipping costs. So I went on a forum and I found a few people who wanted to order some things from bike24. After I made the order I found out that there is something wrong with my order. The customer service is really bad at bike24, they respond slowly and only write short sentences so it took me about 3 emails to find out that I am not allowed to order 6 different tires although that is not specified on the site:

"You can order only 3 items which are in one class of goods at onces"

I asked them to split my order in two but they couldn't do that (I don't know why) so I had to remove 3 tires from the order. After they shipped the packaged an they refunded my money I made another order.

I received 30 emails from bike24 and Yahoo couldn't count how many I wrote. There were some products that they couldn't ship because they were sold while I was writing emails so those had to be replaced that is why there are so many emails. The whole process took about two months but at least I have some mud tires...

I will send the url of this post to bike24 and I hope they can at least explain why they have this rule or at least put it in their Terms and Conditions.

I will try to avoid ordering from bike24 in the future.

I have a new fork

This winter I killed my Dart 2 so I had to get a new fork. I decided to buy a white Rock Shox Reba. I had the chance to try it out in the city and I can feel the difference. The ride is a lot smoother and it feels like the front of the bike is lighter (the new fork is about 700 grams lighter then the old one). The Dart is en entry level fork, the Reba is almost as good as the famous SID (it's a bit heavier). I'm looking forward to try it out in the forest, were it belong. I'll post more pics and technical details later. Here is a picture I took last night: