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.

Opencart - my choice for a shop on the web

It's been a while since my last tech post... I enjoy my work but usually it's just work and not always you get to do something that you really like. But sometimes I get to do something very interesting and than I can call my work a hobby.

My new hobby is called OpenCart. Yes, I like open source and I try to use open source as much as I can. I understand that you have to pay sometimes for software but I don't understand why you have to pay hundreds of dollars or euros for some software that you just use sometimes because you have to. And yes it is ok to pay for software if you make money using it. So this is why I will ask for some money for what I'm working on.

So you ask what am I working on... I am developing filtering options for OpenCart. If you take a look at this great shopping cart you can observe that it is a great software but it lacks some filters. So I'm developing some filters for this cart, some filters that can be fully customized. You can choose the filters for your product and you can even choose for which category to display filters.

I like OpenCart because it is open source, it is mvc and it doesn't use any templating language (like smarty).

I hope I can finish this project next week and than I will try to make an install version. I was thinking that I will ask for about 5 euros for this extensions and donate at least half of it to OpenCart :)