robricc: Digital River actually gets it right sometimes.


Well, in part because I'm smart enough to order items that are listed as out of stock, Digital River has also failed to hurt me *lately*. I got the "spare", my lenses and a tuner. 3 for 3 in recent months (emphasis on recent).

However, my perception is that some of these self-selected discussions about vendor/product performance (not just on this BBS) can often obscure just how bad things really are.

For grins I did a little spreadsheet exercise using a pseudo-random function where I took 5000 hypothetical DR single-item orders and matched them up with 1000 hypothetical customers who (using you, myself, and many other folks as an example) each place 5 separate single-item orders.

Allowing DR a per-order success rate of 90%, 680 customers had all 5 orders completed without error (That's you!), but 345 experienced 1 error, 67 experienced 2 and 8 experienced 3 errors.

When I changed the per-order success rate to 75%, there were still 120 customers who, like you, got all 5 items without problems, but fully 411 out of 1000 experienced 1 error, 283 experienced 2 errors, 75 experienced 3 and 12 experienced 4!

OK, OK, the methodology is very crude and imperfect. It is certainly pseudo-random and outcomes are not distributed across all customers (those that ordered 1, 2, 3 or N times or who ordered variable numbers of items per order). Also, I have no real idea of how DR performs on a per-order basis.

Still, I expect this cheap little exercise is somewhat representative and what the exercise reinforces for me is that it is the negative exceptions from good perfomance (and reports of same) that deserve much more attention. Essentially you have to keep your performance/success numbers *much* higher than either of my two scenarios to be be perceived as providing adequate service. As compared to the (relatively small) overall denominator of Empeg owners and, thus, the number of potential orders through DR, the numerator of horror stories, many but not all of them posted on this BBS, is exceptionally high. I would be amazed if DR bats 85%

So, the fact that DR enjoys a dismal reputation is, in my opinion, completely deserved. I really think they need to go belly-up.

I *would* like to get some $500 software package for $200, though, before they go!