# RPGNow order problem on Taverner's Trusty Tome



## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

RPGNow lists ENWorld's TAVERNER'S TRUSTY TOME for $2.50 on sale, but when I try to buy it, the price jumps to $5.00. I put an email in to them (haven't heard back), but thought you guys should know about this, as you may have a more direct line of communication to them than I do.


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## HellHound (Oct 24, 2003)

That's odd.

Does the same thing happen if you add two products to your cart (the Tome and one other product worth at least $2.50)?

The minimum order @ RPGnow is $5 (well, $4.95)


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## twistnack (Oct 24, 2003)

Iron_Chef said:
			
		

> RPGNow lists ENWorld's TAVERNER'S TRUSTY TOME for $2.50 on sale, but when I try to buy it, the price jumps to $5.00. I put an email in to them (haven't heard back), but thought you guys should know about this, as you may have a more direct line of communication to them than I do.




Because of the way RPGNow handles money they have to charge at lease $5.00 for any purchase. For the normal price buy something else so your total is $5.00 or more. It's kind of a pain that's why you don't see a lot of pdf priced below $5.00.

Of course if the book's free then you don't have this problem either.

Edit: HellHound ended up posting a better answer while I was writing this. Darn.


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

At first I couldn't complete the order, then I added a couple other products to get my total to over $5. Checkout was enabled, but then the price magically doubled on Taverner's Trusty Tome at the order confirmation screen, making my order closer to $8. I did not have two copies of the book in my cart. I don't want to pay $5 for this book when it's clearly advertised as being $2.50 on their site. Their email response wasn't helpful at all: 

"Are you using a coupon number? YOU may have to us the special link
after you login. I think there is a bug in the system. If that's not
the case, maybe it's that you have 2 of the items in your cart? Try
removing it and ading it just once. James"   

I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of this book... I was more interested in the "running inns and taverns" section than drinks and drinking rules. I hope it isn't just a couple pages and is actually fairly detailed but easy to use, as my character is the son of an innkeeper and stands to inherit the family inn. Knowing how to run it even before I take over would be helpful, plus he's thinking of buying a tavern. We're doing a city based campaign and so running the business won't interfere so much with my adventuring.


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

I just tried buying it again, but upon checkout, the price of THE
TAVERNER'S TRUSTY TOME skyrocketed up to $7.50, more than the original $6.95 price, and $5.00 more than the advertised sale price. There must be a bug in their system that is _randomly_ assigning prices to this pdf on checkout!


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

Iron_Chef said:
			
		

> I just tried buying it again, but upon checkout, the price of THE
> TAVERNER'S TRUSTY TOME skyrocketed up to $7.50, more than the original $6.95 price, and $5.00 more than the advertised sale price. There must be a bug in their system that is _randomly_ assigning prices to this pdf on checkout!




My third attempt to buy several items caused two of three three items (FEATS, VOL. 1 and LOCUS: GROUP FEATS) to randomly increase in price by $1-2 (this time, THE TAVERNER'S TRUSTY TOME did not jump in price past $2.50). They seem to have a major bug in your system that is randomly increasing the prices of ALL their items (not every item in every order, but multiple items caused price increases in three out of four order attempts)!

I was able to finally get my order processed on my FOURTH ATTEMPT (LOL) without the price bumps, but most customers would have given up long ago. They better get that fixed fast!!!


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

triple post, boards too darn slow


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 24, 2003)

triple post, boards too darn slow


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## Morrus (Oct 25, 2003)

Have you tried asking the store about the problems with their setup?  James' email addy is webmaster@rpgnow.com.


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 25, 2003)

Morrus said:
			
		

> Have you tried asking the store about the problems with their setup?  James' email addy is webmaster@rpgnow.com.




Yeah, I emailed all this same info over to James, right before I posted it here. He hasn't replied yet. They are pretty slow to reply to emails.


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## jmucchiello (Oct 25, 2003)

Iron_Chef said:
			
		

> Yeah, I emailed all this same info over to James, right before I posted it here. He hasn't replied yet. They are pretty slow to reply to emails.



They are in the middle of opening a physical storefront and not nearly as responsive as before. You shoud also try sending email to sage@rpgnow.com. Sage actually handles customer service and may be less busy than James.


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## PosterBoy (Oct 25, 2003)

What browser are you using?  perhaps you should post your system specs.  I just tired it out and it seemed to work fine.


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 25, 2003)

PosterBoy said:
			
		

> What browser are you using?  perhaps you should post your system specs.  I just tired it out and it seemed to work fine.




I'm using Internet Explorer 6. As I said, sometimes the cart works and sometimes it doesn't; you have to go to the very last step before placing the order before the prices go haywire (if they are going to).


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## rpghost (Oct 26, 2003)

I am really busy with the new store, spending most of every day there. Probably will for the next week or so.

Anwyay, I've tried this myself several times when it was reported, and again just now. Logged in, not logged in, having it auto-login, adding or removeing then adding, etc. The final checkout screen before payment always seems fine.

So my one and only ROUGH guess is that since the system uses PHP sessions and COOKIES to store information/data, maybe you have that info blocked or truned off? Can you add items to a cart while logged off? That usually means the cookie is working if you can.

I donno. I'm stumpped. I having done any recent changes to the code. In fact the file date on all the checkout code is Augest or earlier. The shopping cart coad is June. Thus I donno why this would be happing now or how to trigger it.

It must be releated to some data ... so maybe that product is entered goofy? I'm at a loss. If more analitical data is given I can try more things.

Also, try clicking through to the credit card or paypal payment. You have to enter something more on each of those pages before the payment acutally is made so don't worry -but I'm currious if the right amount is passed to the payment system and just displayed wrong.

Lastly, I donno why people do this, but this is NOT a support forum for RPGNow. We have a support forum here:
http://forums.rpghost.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=5
which we monitor. This board is NOT monitored and I only saw this after someone forwared it to me.

James




JAmes


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## Morrus (Oct 26, 2003)

rpghost said:
			
		

> Lastly, I donno why people do this, but this is NOT a support forum for RPGNow. We have a support forum here:
> http://forums.rpghost.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=5
> which we monitor. This board is NOT monitored and I only saw this after someone forwared it to me.



Calm down, James.  This is EN Publishing's fourm.  The chap was having a problem with purchasing an EN Publishing product, so he asked EN Publishing for advice.  Our advice, as you see, was to email you.


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## rpghost (Oct 26, 2003)

Morrus said:
			
		

> Calm down, James.  This is EN Publishing's fourm.  The chap was having a problem with purchasing an EN Publishing product, so he asked EN Publishing for advice.  Our advice, as you see, was to email you.




Didn't mean to sound upset or needing to be calmed down  Must be the long hours. Sorry. I was simply stressing that this happens a lot. People come here to complain about problems that our support team can usually take care of if they just email us. This isn't the first time, by far. Even though this guy did email me first so that's not the issue here. Just wanted to stress the point first. Sorry didn't mean to bite anyone  

Anyway, if you're interested in what I've been working my but off on lately, check out the gallery of construction pictures here:

http://www.game-universe.com/gallery.php

Cheers,
James


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## Iron_Chef (Oct 26, 2003)

Maybe my firewall had something to do with it, but if it starts to interfere with my ordering it always tells me, and I disable it long enough to place the order. I have third party cookies enabled and was logged in, making use of previously stored customer information when I attempted to place each order. 

I have bought stuff from various other online merchants recently with no such price jumping problem, which leads me to believe there's something wrong with RPGNow, rather than me. I've bought plenty of times from RPGNOW in the past, and have never had this (or any other) problem before. 

I was disappointed with James' customer service, but the delays are at least understandable after finding out he is opening a storefront. This was not explained in his emails to me, making it look like there was no good reason for the delayed response other than possible understaffing or inattentiveness to customer email. Of course, his response wasn't at all helpful when I did get it, but then, neither he nor anyone else seems to be encountering this problem, so having no immediate "quick fix" or explanation is to to be expected. Still, it could have been articulated better, as well as the reason for the long delay in replies provided. There is no mention of opening the storefront and/or long delays in replies mentioned on the site anywhere I could see, which would have made me less disappointed in the customer service I received.

I just tried placing the same order again a minute ago as an experiment at RPGNow and everything appears to be working fine, so maybe the situation has resolved itself. Weird.

I posted all this here only AFTER contacting RPGNOW; I did not expect to get customer service from RPGNOW in this forum. I merely thought it a good idea to inform ENWORLD Publishing of a possible ordering problem with their product which, if it was not limited to me, would surely negatively impact the book in question's sales. All the main problems were first reported to RPGNOW like any sane and responsible customer would have done, and I expected RPGNOW to resolve the matter, not ENWorld. This thread was just an FYI to the publisher, and I thought maybe they might know a faster way to get ahold of RPGNOW than I, since they had a financial stake in RPGNOW's timely fixing of this problem. Seems logical to me to post here as I did.

I was not aware RPGNOW even had a forum; if it is one that must be registered to join, I doubt I would have bothered to use it; I never use support forums if I can help it, preferring direct email contact; it makes me feel special, LOL. Their contact information is harder to find than it should be... They should have a "Contact Us" link on the TOP of every page, not way at the bottom and in tiny print as many pages are quite long to scroll down, and I'm too exhausted from looking at products to notice the small print at the bottom of the page. One should not have to hunt for where such important customer service information might be found; it looks like every link is at the top of every page, so for awhile I assumed there was NO contact information (!) until I found it by accident. Either that's bad site navigation, or I'm a moron. Naturally, I prefer to think of it as the former.


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