I have ordered the Little box of Horrors at Varese website more than a month ago and due to the horrible shippingcharges for Europe I also added Jerry Goldsmiths The Haunting to the order, i was happy that I apparently was able to fetch the last horrorbox because after my order it showed "sold out" on their website. I got a shipping notice for this order 12 days ago with this message: "All of the items from order VS30002 have now been shipped", they have added pictures showing the 2 items. Now today I suddenly received a Paypal Refund for this Little box of Horrors box without any pre-notification....it looks like they only send me the Haunting cd! In that case I wander why they never informed me earlier and gave me a chance to reconsider this order.
Because I am still waiting for the package(!) I can only assume there is also an extra tax (Chrismas) bonus to pay for the total value afterwards.....(I knew this bill would come afterall but paying 21% customfees over value and shippingcosts for just one cd is just Silly!)
I emailed them but no responds as of now!
Just out of curiosity, Did anyone ever experienced this with Varese?
I made a big order when they had the sale on their site. They took my money right away. I waited over a week and a half and never got a shipping notice. I emailed them and the response was something like, "Thank you for reminding us you placed an order, will ship it out soon!"
I made a big order when they had the sale on their site. They took my money right away. I waited over a week and a half and never got a shipping notice. I emailed them and the response was something like, "Thank you for reminding us you placed an order, will ship it out soon!"
Varese are the only ones out of the other major score suppliers who put the full value on the packaging causing a customs charge.I had a $160 worth of scores from one of the big ones last week with a value of $10 so it came through no problem.Why Varese do this is beyond me.So I never use them now.
Varese are the only ones out of the other major score suppliers who put the full value on the packaging causing a customs charge.I had a $160 worth of scores from one of the big ones last week with a value of $10 so it came through no problem.Why Varese do this is beyond me.So I never use them now.
They used to left of the package value on a package in the past. I (almost) never had to pay extra duties afterwards when ordering at Varese (and I have ordered there soooo many times!!!). Maybe they had some problems with this lately with customs or it is their new policy, who can tell....
I have ordered the Little box of Horrors at Varese website more than a month ago and due to the horrible shippingcharges for Europe I also added Jerry Goldsmiths The Haunting to the order, i was happy that I apparently was able to fetch the last horrorbox because after my order it showed "sold out" on their website. I got a shipping notice for this order 12 days ago with this message: "All of the items from order VS30002 have now been shipped", they have added pitctures showing the 2 items. Now today I suddenly received a Paypal Refund for this Little box of Horrors box without any pre-notification....it looks like they only send me the Haunting cd! In that case I wander why they never informed me earlier and gave me a chance to reconsider this order.
Because I am still waiting for the package(!) I can only assume there is also an extra tax (Chrismas) bonus to pay for the total value afterwards.....(I knew this bill would come afterall but paying 21% customfees over value and shippingcosts for just one cd is just Silly!)
I emailed them but no responds as of now!
Just out of curiosity, Did anyone ever experienced this with Varese?
I have never heard a story like this before. I guess it was a computer glitch.
I have ordered the Little box of Horrors at Varese website more than a month ago and due to the horrible shippingcharges for Europe I also added Jerry Goldsmiths The Haunting to the order, i was happy that I apparently was able to fetch the last horrorbox because after my order it showed "sold out" on their website. I got a shipping notice for this order 12 days ago with this message: "All of the items from order VS30002 have now been shipped", they have added pitctures showing the 2 items. Now today I suddenly received a Paypal Refund for this Little box of Horrors box without any pre-notification....it looks like they only send me the Haunting cd! In that case I wander why they never informed me earlier and gave me a chance to reconsider this order.
Because I am still waiting for the package(!) I can only assume there is also an extra tax (Chrismas) bonus to pay for the total value afterwards.....(I knew this bill would come afterall but paying 21% customfees over value and shippingcosts for just one cd is just Silly!)
I emailed them but no responds as of now!
Just out of curiosity, Did anyone ever experienced this with Varese?
I have never heard a story like this before. I guess it was a computer glitch.
So worst case scenario!: Varese gave me a partial refund on the shippingcharges with the message that The "Little Box of Horrors" is no longer available for sale (????) WTF??? Ordered it more than a month ago when it obviously was available on their site! They only send me the Haunting without any notification of their -tiny- "Glitch" before sending me this order, the Email with the shipping notice clearly tells me they send me my complete order..... I am really pissed now, because I know now that I have to pay big time (+extra) for only ONE audio cd.........is this the way this is going with them, after I spend a small fortune at their store in all those years????I have literally 15 banana-boxes filled with soundtrack cd's opened-unopened which I ordered there. Is this the way they are going to treat their costumers this way nowadays!!!
Varese are the only ones out of the other major score suppliers who put the full value on the packaging causing a customs charge.I had a $160 worth of scores from one of the big ones last week with a value of $10 so it came through no problem.Why Varese do this is beyond me.So I never use them now.
They used to left of the package value on a package in the past. I (almost) never had to pay extra duties afterwards when ordering at Varese (and I have ordered there soooo many times!!!). Maybe they had some problems with this lately with customs or it is their new policy, who can tell....
The last few orders I have had to pay an additional £15 on the two CDs I ordered.With the poor exchange rate here in the UK it just adds to the misery.So now I just order them from the other major supplier instead of Varese.I do get what you are saying.
Naxos is the shipper now and it's against postal regulations and they do not lower the price. Often times Germany and other countries kept returning packages to us because we had marked them down. Naxos doesn't mark down packages as they can get into big trouble. Todd just mentioned to me the marking down of packages is on the Varese website under FAQ. In regards to the Little Box refunding. I've had this happen to me here and there. I believe you were refunded for the Little Box, correct?
Sorry for any and all confusion. I also have bought a lot from SAE and never had an issue so not sure what that is about.
The extra payment of duties is not my main issue here. I was prepared having to pay extra. But only for the complete package.The point is that Varese should have mentioned on front before shipping the order that they could not complete this order because of their inventory mistake. Their mistake. This company is in business for a very long time they should know by now how this works.they even emailed me a shippingnotice for the complete order...(????) If I knew this box was not available anymore I would gladly have cancelled this order but they kept their mouth shut and waited till the package has almost arrived here. A bit suspicious that they suddenly remember after 2 weeks they forgot to include the horror box.
The extra payment of duties is not my main issue here. I was prepared having to pay extra. But only for the complete package.The point is that Varese should have mentioned on front before shipping the order that they could not complete this order because of their inventory mistake. Their mistake. This company is in business for a very long time they should know by now how this works.they even emailed me a shippingnotice for the complete order...(????) If I knew this box was not available anymore I would gladly have cancelled this order but they kept their mouth shut and waited till the package has almost arrived here. A bit suspicious that they suddenly remember after 2 weeks they forgot to include the horror box.
Please send a note to Todd about all of this, please. orders(at)varesesarabande.com. Though Naxos does handle this, I feel reaching out to someone actually AT Varese might be better.
Of course I already did contact Varese and this is their answer:
"Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, we were just notified about this inventory error; we had been informed that there was enough inventory to fulfill all open orders, but it appears that was not the case, as this inventory ran out sooner than expected. We sincerely apologize for this. Please let us know if you have any additional questions".
Not a very professional approach and a very easy answer. Again I think it is still suspicious that they suddenly remember after 2 weeks that they forgot to include the boxset. I am not happy about this whole situation.
jacky, the box that the Haunting was in, was it big enough to hold a little box of horrors set? Or was the box/package you received only big enough for 1 maybe 2 CD's?
Jacky, as someone who also ordering from Europe and therefore having to bundle everything wisely so as to minimize shipping & custom charges, I really can feel your pain!
Hope you'll still be lucky and find the box at a reasonable price somewhere!
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On a related note (though not as bad a case as yours) I'm quite annoyed by Varese myself. I ordered all three CDs of the latest batch and had to wait for weeks for them to ship (in fact I still haven't got them at all). Interestingly enough Varese charged me immediately (probably due to a shipping error).
While not my preferred method of handling this, it was okay for me till the day when all these titles went on BF-sale before mine even shipped! So I payed and supported them weeks in advance and am therefore NOT receiving the benefits of a sale. That would NEVER ever happen with any of the other labels!
I tried contacting them and received kind but unhelpful replies along the lines of: "Unfortunately, it is Varese Sarabande's store policy that sale prices are only honored for transactions placed within the promotional period. We sincerely apologize for this. The Varese Sarabande sales team is very aware of this issue, and will ensure that this sort of situation does not happen again in the future.
Of course I've got to "admit" that I did not complain immediately about all this as I was so quite upset, when I realized the craziness of this situation. Still I feel this situation was not handled well at all.
In the end it will also hurt me twice as it would have also decreased my customs charges considerably, but at least it's a lesson well learned.
The pity is that I truly love Varese as they were my teen heroes for releasing all kinds of dream scores such as The Stand & Dune! And now for a few years they have truly reemerged with club-releases that I really want. But all this customer related issues are just weird!
Despite all this I think Peter is really doing his very best to help us all out there and therefore I'd like to thank him! I can well see that it's not an easy job, especially on our boards!
It would be certainly much easier job if they cared enough to properly fix their own errors. And as someone who has been working in QC for the past 10 years, it is really not that difficult to actually check the check disc... especially with so much time they´ve had between the title was announced and when it actually started shipping.
It´s really not that difficult to listen to a CD, make sure there are no mastering errors and cross check the actual disc with the packaging info... But again they would need to give a damn first about quality of their product...
Really sad state of affairs these past several years... But I am glad I am not the only one who sees that Varese is going to hell.
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and re Naxos... with so much BS posted all the time on both FB and Twitter of VS, why there was no such information about Naxos taking over the distribution? Was it that damned difficult to just post something like:
"Naxos will be our new distributor from now on. Check FAQ page for details."
And actually warn their customers?
They just suddenly changed, no info about it, started suddenly they full prices listed policy and caused another massive expensive and major head-ache to all their EU customers.
They just suddenly changed, no info about it, started suddenly they full prices listed policy and caused another massive expensive and major head-ache to all their EU customers.
I'm not sure if they did inform customers of the changes, however as I've said before the move towards releasing box-sets along with their shipping practices would indicate that they are focusing on the U.S. market rather than the world outside of the States.
Naxos is the shipper now and it's against postal regulations and they do not lower the price. Often times Germany and other countries kept returning packages to us because we had marked them down. Naxos doesn't mark down packages as they can get into big trouble. Todd just mentioned to me the marking down of packages is on the Varese website under FAQ. In regards to the Little Box refunding. I've had this happen to me here and there. I believe you were refunded for the Little Box, correct?
Sorry for any and all confusion. I also have bought a lot from SAE and never had an issue so not sure what that is about.
Well there goes a lot of your international orders... We know it’s not your fault but with exchange rates as they are and shipping rates having skyrocketed in the last few years most of us have had to scale back on orders a huge amount as it is. Adding a customs charge (and it’s the ludicrous ‘Processing’ fee on top that costs the most) on top of every order is completely cost prohibitive and just not worth it, you’re looking at almost £40 for a single CD all told!
Do you currently have a cost effective European distributor we can order directly from instead?
