Ordinary Nothing

I’ve recently made another order of several CDs from CD Baby.

This latest order arrived with a few problems: one of the CDs was missing¹, and two were cracked.
The missing CD was clearly their fault, so I wouldn’t have expected problems from anyone. But in this case they also made no problem at all about sending replacements for the cracked CDs.
They didn’t demand that I’ll mail them the defective CDs back. They didn’t say it was a problem in shipment, or my own fault for asking the CDs without the plastic jewel-box. They just emailed back that they’re sorry, and shipped a new package straight off.

This is the proper way to do it.
I can get the stores that demand returning the original, they’re probably worried about fraud. But from the consumer POV it would create a very bad experience, and anyone demanding I’ll ship something back internationally would have probably lost a customer, especially considering it’s not a repeated occurrence.

While I’m at it, some other (good) things about CD Baby:

1. They have a very wide selection of artists, some extremely good, and all from RIAA-free independent labels (So if you care, there’s no need to go check the RIAA Radar before purchasing).
2. The you-may-also-like recommendations made overall much more sense than what I’m used to in other places like Amazon. I’m not sure why, since I suppose both are based on purchase statistics and recommendation of real people, but that’s the way it is.
3. For returning customers, they send an extra surprise CD in each shipment. From my experience (In the cases where it wasn’t a collection, of course) the match for my taste wasn’t perfect, but still good. And they might have done better if I’d bought in smaller batches, since the obvious matches they had – I already saw and bought.
4. They are willing to send CDs without the plastic boxes. This both reduces the original shipment charges (less weight/volume), and drastically reduces the chances that someone in border customs will open the package (it being small. You can fit about 10 CDs in the volume of one plastic CD box)). Of course it can result in cases where rough handling will damage the CDs, but this is the only case it happened to me so far, over several purchases. And I’m still not sure this is why these CDs were cracked, considering the cracked ones were inside the package surrounded by perfectly whole CDs.
5. Samples for audio tracks are usually available for most tracks, are long, and are in MP3.

Certainly, unless I want a specific artist which they don’t sell, they remain my preferred audio CDs store.

¹ For which I noticed they have a sort of an excuse. The band changed the name, and reissued the CD with a new cover and track order. Possibly there was someone that didn’t find the requested CD, and another person that knew there is no problem and they have it in stock…

November 5th, 2004 at 23:14 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.