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> Revamped Ilford website |
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#1
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Revamped Ilford website
Online today the newly revamped Ilford/Harman website.
Ian |
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I seem to be following you around on this today, Ian. I may have spotted one thing which I find strange. Yes it's that old devil called pricing. It seems that yo can now buy a 50 pack of 35mm HP5+ for just over £226 which is £4.54 per cassette but this is exactly the same price per cassette as buying one cassette!
As an aside, it has been a while since I bought HP5+ but it seems to have shot up in price. Have I got this wrong about a box of 50 HP5+ being no cheaper than buying one cassette? I hope others on FADU will look at the new site so we can discuss its merits or otherwise Mike |
#3
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As a follow-up to this I can now reveal that the way the shop site is configured you appear to actually have buy articles before you get prices.OK if you are testing the market you can then clear your basket but it is not as transparent as before. All you see before you buy is a "from £X price"which is largely meaningless. The price of a 50 pack of 36 frame HP5+ cassettes is in fact £288.53 which is £5.77 per cassette. If I buy one cassette it is £5.78 so the discount for buying 50 cassettes is only 1p per cassette!.
The price now way exceeds what some of our sponsors charge whereas a few months ago Harman Express actually competed and if you bought over £50 was often better. To give you an idea Harman Express now charges £1.15 more per HP5+ cassette than Sharif Photographic. A check on its paper MG Pearl 5x7 box of 100 reveals that this is appreciably more expensive than at least one of our sponsors. I haven't checked all paper but I'd be surprised if the same isn't true there as well. I bought a set of MG filters only 4 months ago from Harman Express and I am sure the price of these has jumped considerably. I think I paid about £24. They are now £30. A few months ago a complete set of under-the-lens filter in their holder and with lens attachment was about £55 at most. It is now over £68. I'd need to check my Harman account to be sure about how much everything I bought then has increased in price but apparently Harman Express no longer exists as such and you have to re-register so whether I can check previous purchases remains to be seen. I note that a 902 filter for the Ilford safelight is now nearly £65 for the filter alone. Wow! I can only think that retailers were complaining that Harman was competing against them and it has been persuaded to stop doing so but frankly from what I have seen it is now so uncompetitive that it may as well shut the shop. I am surprised that no-one else as yet has anything to say about the new site. All I can say is that I am a little traumatised by what I have seen so far. I cannot help but feel gloomy about the future. Would this have happened under the "old Harman" if I can call it that. I may be naive about how it was run before but I somehow doubt it and at least Simon Galley would have attempted to explain the price changes. The current Harman Tech Service have only thanked APUGers for their comments about the structure of the site. Mike |
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A bit early to say as I've only had a short view and I'm not too down on it, but it does have issues...
All the previous information is still there, but merging the sales side with the technical side of things is not helpful. If I want a data sheet for a product it seems I have to drill down through 3 or 4 pages and then scroll past the marketing bumf to get to the download link for the data sheet. Technical content should have it's own section to save a lot of browsing back and forth. I don't care about the prices; I've never bought directly from them and did not ever expect to. The site looks OK on a mobile device which was no doubt one of the requirements. They have however rather stupidly broken EVERY link on the Internet that points to their datasheets and other technical info, destroying two decades of links from articles, forums and blogs etc. It will take years to get that back. They should have kept an archive with the original URLs. It certainly looks more modern than the old one, but, seemingly inevitably, that comes with an attendant reduction in practicality. Overall I'll give it a C+. A good idea to revamp the site, but it is rather messy in the implementation. |
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One of the strange things, for me at least, is seeing a category 'Colour Film' & getting an instant journey into orange Agfa land. I know Ilford have bought in colour film before, but at least it was dressed up in Ilford livery.
I can't help thinking that the old management would have done this 'over their dead bodies', Ilford always had a very keen sense of it's own corporate image. |
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Martin, I saw Ilford branded colour film last time I was in Istanbul about 7 years ago, it was on the shelf of the Turkish Ilford importer/distributor.
All the branding on the box was simialar to thier B&W films, I should have bought some, it was fresh stock. I was actually after 5x4 HP5 and they had none in stock, however they sent me to another shop on the first floor of an arcade next to them who had 2 boxes, a few months out of date but it was OK. The same store had a lot of Polywarmtone paper I would have like to buy the lot but I wasn't taking chances as I could see the Ilford papers were in old packaging, So I asked someone I knew in Istanbul if they'd tried the paper and my hunch was right it had all gone foggy due to poor storage inn the summer heat. Ian |
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I only tried this new website a few days ago, and for some reason found I had to re-register if I wished to purchase anything. They were still sending me e-mail newsletters, so I assumed my details from the old website were still on their records. Obviously not, for some reason.
With regards to pricing if I understood correctly, Mike mentioned about purchasing film and they're quoting "prices from £xxx". It seems they always quote the price for 20 exposures first (probably because it looks better than the 36 exposure price?). Clicking on the 36 exp. box and then the quantity will give you the price for that. In my case, I tried Delta 400 which is £6.98 individually, or £64.87 for a pack of 10. I'm not really sure why they changed their website in all honesty as I didn't see much wrong with the old one personally.
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Carl. |
#8
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Quote:
On the discount pricing it appears that the discount for 10 is reasonable at 50p per cassette and now I note that there is a reasonable discount on the 50 pack of HP5+ I quoted in my earlier post so it was clearly a mistake which Ilford has corrected Just a pity that it felt it had to launch the new website without "ironing out all the creases" so to speak Mike |
#9
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Quote:
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Carl. |
#10
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Different web software will use a different database to hold info like this. It would be expensive to hire an expert to transfer the data from the old to new databases. Said expert would have to take the time to understand how both databases internally store the data. This might take a few days at (at least) 50 beer tokens per hour.
Simpler, if available, is that some systems will have the option to export and import user data as XML or CSV etc files, but even then it is unlikely that the exported data will be in the same format expected by the importing software so some data conversion will still be necessary at the same kind of hourly rate. Cheaper to just ask people to re-register. |
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