Activation codes and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! We hope 2010 is your best yet!

Our store has now re-opened for the year, after a fantastic Hunter Valley Christmas (a few caches, and lots of good food and wine!)

Orders that were placed over Christmas will all be shipped by tomorrow for items that were in stock. Special order items are still a couple of weeks away.

We've had a number of enquiries in regards to the retrieval of activation codes. Firstly please enter your tracking number on our site http://geocachestore.com.au/activation-codes.html. For December orders the activation codes may not be listed, this is due to one of our main distributors website being down.

For any codes you cannot find please email through to us at admin@geocachestore.com.au; the name of the trackable/s, and the tracking number/s, and we will email our supplier and get back to you asap.

Christmas Wishes and Backorder Update

Hi All,

Merry Christmas! Thank you for your support of Geocachestore this year; the store's popularity has exceeded all our expectations, we've learnt a lot along the way and look forward to doing things bigger and better in 2010!

Backorders for Christmas
We are doing everything possible to have our backorders out in time for Christmas.

The Aussie Track-a-bears are arriving this Friday 18th December and all backorders will be posted same day (providing they arrive before 5pm!)

All other backorder items are in transit, and are scheduled to arrive Monday 21st, when again we will post all orders straight away.

We are now at the mercy of International and local shipping agencies!

For any items that could not be ordered from suppliers, we will be emailing customers today.

Christmas Trading
Geocachestore will be closed from Tuesday 23rd December, re-opening Monday 11th January. Orders will still be able to be placed through the store, however won't be shipped until Monday 11th.

General Backorders and Special Order Items
As you will see on the store, most of our stock has sold out for Christmas! We have temporarily disabled the ordering of items that are on backorder in order to avoid delays for our customers.

Special order items can still be ordered, as we then get these in on a one-by-one basis. Please note with Christmas the lead time is 4 weeks for Special Order Items.

We're anticipating having no stock shortages for the store by February this coming year.

As always please feel free to contact us with any enquiries.

May your Christmas and New Year, be happy, safe and full of good caching!!

Aaron and Zoe

Website down-time

Geocachestore.com.au will not be available from 5pm today, owing to site maintenance. The site should be back up and running by midnight.

Any issues please don't hesitate to contact us admin@geocachestore.com.au

Thanks,

Zoe

Stock Levels Updated

A quick update... stock quantities have been updated to include Groundspeak and trackable stock that arrived last week (which is already selling very quickly!!)

For those awaiting geocoin backorders they are in transit and will hopefully be out to you next week.

A new shipment of Firetacks is a couple of weeks away, as are our Aussie Track-a-bears. Our camo tape is ordered and waiting for our supplier to get stock in.

I've also caught up on all our contact requests... so please feel free to drop me an email with any issues or queries! :)

Enjoy the weekend ahead.. with lots of caching (hopefully!!)

Zoe

Groundspeak backorders due in tomorrow!

Firstly I want to give a big thank you to our patient and valued customers; we've experienced some unexpected delays with backorders this month, which meant that for some of our customers backorders have stretched beyond the 3 week mark. We were also overwhelmed with contact requests which meant that we couldn't get back to everyone within 24hours as we normally do. (Moral of the story... don't go on holidays! hehe, just kidding)

We do apologise for this, we had so many orders come through the last two months that it messed with our stock levels... we've now got everything back under control, so you can expect approx. 2 weeks delay on backorder items, and 3 weeks on special order items (or less) depending on where we are with our ordering cycle!

We will also make sure in future that we provide updates to our customers if items are delayed longer than this.

Now for the good news! Groundspeak orders are due to be delivered to us tomorrow. Hence we will be working hard to have everyones backorders posted out by Friday.

All other backorders are now in transit to us and only approx. 1 week away (hopefully less) as we've ordered expediated shipping on all products.

You may have noticed that our track-a-bears have sold out... don't worry we're having more manufactured, with an expected lead time of 4 weeks (it takes longer when we have to have things made).

Our geocoin suppliers have a lot of coins on backorder, so if you are after geocoins in particular please check back in a month... as we will have some new and exciting coins for you. On their way are the trackable travellers, i.e. travel turtles, pirates, ignots as well as geocaching pins, and as I said before our stocked range of Groundspeak merchandise.

As always please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Zoe

Travel Bugs & other whispers

Normally I just use this blog to advertise, but I thought I’d put up something a bit different.

I got an email the other day from someone and it really got me thinking. Here’s how the email opened.

Hi Aaron,

Just wondering if there is a better deal available on travel bugs? The conversion to AUD means you can get 20 units from US sources for under $100AUD.

In reply to the email, I wanted to share some facts that I now want to share with you, our loyal customers, about a simple item like Travel Bugs that you may not be aware of:

• Groundspeak offers us a discount of 12%. That's all. Not 30% discounts or anything like that. And, it doesn't matter how much we buy, that's all we get.
• When we started the store, our one and only competitor were selling TB's for $12.95. We thought that was a bit of a rip off, so we decided to sell them at $7.95.
• Groundspeak does not sell to Aussies direct. Therefore we could charge more, like one of our competitors did, but we don't. He's since matched our prices, which is great, we like competition!
• Since February we’ve sold over 600 TB's.
• We offer a discount for multiple travel bugs.
• If we kept matching the US dollar rate, we'd change our prices every week. Some weeks you'd pay alot more, other weeks a bit less. Or we could offer a constant price like we do now. Which is easier and better for our customers? Could you imagine the emails we’d get if we sold them one week for $7.00 and the next week for $9.00?
• At our price of $7.95 when the US dollar was terrible, we were making a loss on every unit we sold. We sold 200 of them in the first month. That’s alot of loss.
• None of our suppliers offer us our goods on consignment. That means we buy things in bulk and we carry it all. Sometimes I have bills to pay but I can't because we're carrying too much stock or have an order to make for special order items.
• We can ship travel bugs to customers, for the most part, the next day. If you bought them from the US, it's a minimum 5 days for us with USPS Expediated shipping.
• Usually we get hit for 14.5% customs duties before they even get to our house. (4.5% customs duties + GST).
• If customer orders are over $60, they get FREE shipping no matter what country they’re in or how much they order. The other day someone ordered 5 ammo boxes to WA and it cost us $38 shipping. Ouch.
• We run the business as a hobby and as a whole only just break even. That means we're basically running ‘not for profit’.
• Geocaching NSW members get a further 8% discount of our prices + we donate 8% of all sales made by their members to the organisation. That means GCNSW members get TB's at 16% off our price. We're more than happy for other GC organisations to approach us for a similar deal!
  

The simple fact is, we run Geocachestore.com.au for the love of it. We’re geocachers ourselves, we run it for fun. It’s a hobby business run out of a cupboard in our lounge room. Ask anyone who's dropped in to pick up an order! :)

We offer a great service and convenience. If people want it (and they do, we have over 300 customers) then they'll buy it from us.

If customers want to wait a week or more to have their goods shipped from the US (plus are prepared to stay up strange hours to make phone calls if something is wrong) and maybe save a couple of dollars depending on how the USD is that week, they probably already don't buy from us anway!

Can people *sometimes* get some of our items cheaper elsewhere?
Yes, sometimes.

Can they buy it from our suppliers direct?
Absolutely. Well, not Groundspeak, but there are plenty of other US Groundspeak dealers who probably would! Heck, we even say who our suppliers are. Groundspeak, Firetacks, Crazy Caches, Oak Coins, Coins & Pins and our own manufacturer in China.

It's all a simple matter of choice. If you like our products, the fantastic service we offer and the convenience of fast shipping (most of the time! Sometimes we're too broke to get another shipment), you'll occasionally pay a few dollars more.

Usually though, you’ll get a great deal that’s better than buying
from our international counterparts.

We don’t have a monopoly. But isn't that the beauty of the internet? The whole world is our competition! We’re competing with GC stores in the UK, the US, and other countries that I can’t even spell! ;)

Interestingly though, on that note, we have had orders from over 15 different countries including the US (yes they even bought travel bugs from us.. weird eh?)

That’s my vent for the day, I apologise if I’ve offended anybody! If I have, I’m prepared to give you $5 off your next order using the voucher code “OFFENDED”. (Valid until the end of the month)

Please write me an email if you use it so I know if you’re actually offended or just pretending to be to get a discount! ;)

Oregon 200 Review

I've had alot of questions about the Oregon 200 over the last couple of weeks, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on the unit.

As my personal weapon of choice, all I can say is "I LOVE IT". The Oregon 200 has revolutionised our caching thanks to its 'paperless geocaching'. How accurate is it? Well, on saturday this week we hit up Oberon. And by hit up, I mean we did 42 regular caches in a day! We had no problems with accuracy (apart from the usual toing and froing that goes on in a hunt!) and found all 42 caches. It would have been 44, but the other 2 had been muggled!

The only thing that took a bit of getting used to is the distance to cache vs the accuracy. I recommend having these next to each other. Basically, I find that if the distance says 4m and the accuracy is approximately 4m then you can bet that you're practically standing on it.

The touchscreen interface is awesome, it's smooth and intuitive. Once you've installed some quality maps such as Shonky, Open Street Maps & Contours, you'll have all the info you need for even the most difficult hunt. In honesty, I've tried the colorado and the interface is quite clunky in comparison.

The main difference between the 200 and the 300 is the electronic compass and altimiter. Are these important? Most cachers I've spoken to turn these off anyway. So in a word, no! The 300 has more memory, but frankly pop a 4gb SDHC card into either unit and you won't know the difference.

The 300 is still a serious upgrade, but comes with a seriously increased price tag.

Why is the unit discontinued by Garmin?
Usually when you think of a product being discontinued, you think it's because its faulty or out of date. This is not true in this case, Garmin Australia made the decision to drop the Oregon 200 and the Colorado 400c simply to make way for their new range coming out in the next 12 months or so. This was a decision from Garmin Australia only and not worldwide. The unit still has the same warranty, the same parts are available and it's still receiving updates like all the other units.

The difference? It can be had for a STEAL of only $399 including a screen protector, 2gb memory card and a DVD containing all the free maps you could ever use!

Aaron's rating?
Interface: 10/10
Stability: 8/10
Accuracy: 8/10
Value for money: 11/10

Track-a-Bears on their way!

Also, just letting you know that the next shipment of 200 Track-a-Bears are on their way. We're expecting delivery sometime in the next 2 weeks, so you can start ordering these again.

We've lost track of the number of great emails we've received from people who loved these great aussie trackables.

Stay tuned for our new Aussie products coming soon!

New Coins & Restocked items

The post arrived!

Just a quick post to let you know we've just restocked on heaps of items and added some beautiful new trackable coins!

Our next Groundspeak order will be made in about 3 weeks time, our next coin orders in about 4 weeks. Don't forget if there's a coin or pin you really want, we'll get it in for you.

Please keep in mind, we're just a small store run from our house, we can't afford to keep thousands of dollars of stock, so we do what we can. Sometimes there are delays with special order and preorder items.

At the end of the day, we're running this store as a hobby, so try to remember that when there are delays! ;)

Track-a-Bears have landed!

Track-a-bears arrived this morning and we've spent all day getting the backorders packed!

We've only got about 45 left from this initial run, so get in fast. Most of the orders will be sent tomorrow morning so you should start seeing them on monday.

If you miss out on the first run, don't worry, because these will be a permanently stocked item!

We've also got some great new cache ideas for our devious section which we'll be releasing over the next couple of weeks! Stay tuned!