We have stopped
selling our products in our eBay Store.
Our eBay account,
DuncansOnline, will continue as a
buying account for us. We buy regularly on eBay ourselves.
Please do not worry about any undelivered order(s) you may have
with us.
Every single one of our eBay orders has been shipped, so if you
have one that you are waiting for, it is in transit and will
arrive any day.
eMail us or
phone us toll free if you need more tracking information.
International callers can Skype us at DuncansOnline
The same thing applies for your warranty. As you know, all our
items carry a TWO YEAR replacement warranty.
We have been
in business for more than 8 years and we are solid. As a Company, we have
no accounts payable or long term debt. (:))
Further down this page you will find many different ways to
contact us, including through eBay. There is a link to our
Company website as well.
We will be around for a long time, and if your cameras and/or
equipment needs servicing, upgrading, additional components or
any kind of warranty work, we will be right there to help you.
Likewise, you can phone or email us for the lifetime technical
and installation and maintenance support we give to all our
customers.
We finish our selling experience on eBay on top, as a Gold Power
Seller, with 100% feedback in the past year, and a high eBay
Policy Compliance score. In 8.5 years we had 12,000 successful
transactions with more than 5,300 positive feedbacks received.
Only 40% of you leave feedback. We expect and trust the other
60% are just as happy!
We are now well established as one of the leading Online
Surveillance Supply Companies, offering fine products at
competitive and affordable prices with service and support that
exceeds the local brick and mortar store in your area.
Please phone us toll free if you have any questions, comments or
concerns.
Helene and John Duncan - November 2011
IMPORTANT WARRANTY INFORMATION
If you have purchased any
products from us in the past couple of years, either through eBay or
otherwise, it will be helpful and important for you to register on our
new site.
All our warranty work will
be processed through our new site, for faster service and follow up.!
It only takes a few
seconds of your time. There is a box when you register for you to put
some information in at the time you register. Go ahead and put your eBay
ID and a very brief description of what you purchased from us. Any other
comment would be welcome.
Example of what to write!
My eBay ID is MaineBayGuy
1 DVR - 8 channel
8 Outdoor cameras
Comment: Way to go you guys! Congrats on your big decision!
Our TOP 10 BENEFITS from from this change
to our business model.
1. By eliminating the eBay fees in our
selling prices we will be able to pass along these savings to our
customers. Times are tight, and getting tighter, and we hope that any price
reduction we can bring to our customers/installers will help them save money
and allow both of us to be more competitive in the marketplace.
2. Be able to
track transactions more than 90 days, as eBay deletes old
transactions quickly. They also delete old listings just as quickly.
With our TWO YEAR WARRANTY, we need to be able to track all past transactions
easily, quickly and accurately. We need to be able to go back and look at
discontinued listings that are for items still under warranty. In fact, many
customers want us to access cameras they bought from us five years
ago.....they often last that long and longer!!! Now we will be able to do
that, all within one rapidly accessible transaction history that is 100% our
own and under our control.
3. Be able to sell a wider variety of
items, some which are restricted on eBay. An example of this, eBay does
not allow us to sell small cameras with audio as they deem these to be
illegal spy cams. The ones we sell are not illegal!!
4. We will have better tools to provide a
MUCH higher level of service and support, as eBay does not make it
easy for us to deal directly with our buyers, by phone, by online chat
and even by regular email.
eBay does not allow us to incorporate
OnLine Text Chat into our listings. Now we can provide free online instant
contact and rapid chat to anyone looking at any of our products with our
Online Chat feature.
It goes deeper. Our buyers are not able to
contact us easily at all. Sellers are no longer able to put their toll free
phone numbers, Skype numbers and email addresses on eBay listings, making it
very difficult for our buyers to contact sellers for pre-sale support. The
CCTV business can be a complex confusing business, and our buyers,
more often than not, need to be able to communicate and chat with us easily
and quickly prior to making an informed buying decision.
eBay requires sellers to use their own email system, which is slow and
restrictive. It does not allow photos and videos, and does not have the
power of rapid search of the Google mail system that we have integrated into
our new site.
They even delete our customers email
addresses from the records after 45 days making it impossible for us to
contact past customers without using their cumbersome email system. We do
not need two mail systems, especially when one of them is Neanderthal.
eBay does not allow us to accept Bank
Transfers, Personal/Company checks and Western Union Transfers from our
customers. As International Resellers that really restricts our selling.
5. We will now be able to concentrate on
one really outstanding site, instead of splitting our efforts across two
sites, ending up in two mediocre sites. With more than 500 items it is
almost humanly impossible to keep two sites up to date all the time.
We want to broaden our items to more than
2000, and there is no management program that will allow us to integrate
that size of inventory into two different sites. With one serious, flexible
and well designed Corporate site we will have a much better chance to do
that.
6. We will be building our own business,
instead of eBay's. That is what we want. We believe that is what our
customers would tell us they want us to be doing.
7. Concentrate on our International Sales.
eBay is International, but does not treat International Sellers as well as
their Local to Local market sellers. They have separate websites for each
country.......this can be a real headache for a Company like ours.
8. There will be less time wasted on web
site technicalities. Anyone who has ever tried to phone eBay to get
support knows the frustration of long waits, only to speak to a friendly,
respectful and well intentioned person who is nevertheless poorly trained,
not business savvy, and not capable of making a decision without checking
with someone else, resulting in more phone waiting, listening to music.
Online chat with eBay is even worse.
Interesting that they will online chat with us, no matter how poorly,
but will not let us to online chat with our buyers!:)
9. Safety is an issue. eBay attracts
all sorts of unscrupulous people, who attempt to buy in a fraudulent manner.
We can now monitor our own customers totally
ourselves.
10. We believe our clientele is maturing.
They are "Internet Savvy."
Eight years ago, online selling was new and people were not used to it. eBay
introduced many people to online buying.
Today it is online buying has become "every day". The overall usefulness of
eBay to our customers has been diminishing over the years, and while it is
still important for some, the online majority of today has already become
used to online buying....
Ten years ago the eBay stock was selling at
$60 share. Today it is just over half that, despite the fact that the market
average has almost doubled during the same period.
We call this a paradigm shift.
eBay does not provide an opportunity for us
to incorporate installer/reseller discounts and affiliate marketing into our
eBay business. We see installers as the most important segment of our
present and future business growth.
The Negative?
eBay was, in the past, our most important
source of new customers.
But even that has been changing rapidly and radically. Just Google search
DuncansOnline or our trade name
CCTVGold.com and you will see how far we have come up the ladder of
online visibility.
eBay has been become less and less relevant
for us. There are hundreds of sites out there for us to use to attract new
customers that are just as or even more as effective, and less costly than
eBay, These are generally Shopping Comparison sites.
We believe it is time that we stand on our
own feet, and in so doing we can lower our prices, eliminate the eBay fees
in our costs, and benefit our past, present and future customers, as well as
ourselves, all at the same time.
We were paying as much each month to eBay as
we would to a Shopping Center Landlord to rent a medium sized store. The
Internet gives us the chance to do away with the conventional costs of Brick
and Mortar retail selling. We are behind the times if we are not doing
just that.
Just reflecting for a bit, we are proud of
our eBay history.
Bottom line, selling on eBay allowed us to become well established
International CCTV Resellers and Manufacturer Reps with thousands of
businesses, installers and do-it-yourself customers all over the world.
