My Blog In Digital Life

Sarah Tan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:57:37 +0000

My blog is featured in Digital Life, The Straits Times, today! I wrote about the curry puff hawker being jailed. The only bugbear is they gave the wrong title. IRAS is not frighteningly efficient. They took so many years just to find out about tax evasion. A more appropriate title is Scary Digger, since they can dig out information from many years ago.

Click more to look at the entire article and my own blog entry.

Handphone prices: Check whether GST is included

Sarah Tan — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 05:45:49 +0000

Check whether GST is included in the price of the product you are getting before paying. My husband wanted to get a Sony Ericsson P1i phone, and he checked out so many places for the best price. He finally settled on a shop somewhere near town, and got it. It was strange the shop refused to accept credit cards, and even NETS. They wanted cash. I wanted to use my credit card to earn points, but they said we had to pay $20+ extra if we wanted to do so. They were obviously trying to pass on the costs of 3% transaction fee to us. I doubt the points I could earn would be worth $20, so we had to use cash.

Picture from Sony Ericsson

I wanted to go to another shop to buy it, but since he had been eyeing the phone for such a long time, which was supposed to be his birthday gift, and the costs on parking and time would not be worth the additional trips.

The sales assistant later agreed to let me use NETS, so when I entered my PIN, I thought I saw $900+++ instead of $800+++. Despite that, I just pressed enter and did not think too much about it, until we asked to see the receipt. The guy immediately said it was due to GST, but they did not mention it earlier when we asked them for the price. They insisted that their price tags had mentioned that prices were before GST, but we had asked them verbally and they did not mention it to us. It was unfair to us because we did not know the exact costs. They kept saying they never had this problem with other customers, as if it was totally our fault.

The disadvantage with NETS was that they did not have the option of reversing the charges. Actually, I am not sure whether this was real. Their website had little information and information had not been updated since 2004 for some parts of it. Because of this, the shop refused to cancel the purchase.

To the shop’s credit, they tried to throw in some freebies to make up to us for their oversight, but they wanted to give a Bluetooth earpiece which was supposed to be compatible. We did not want this, so in the end, we settled on a memory card, but still had to top up more money.

When there is fierce competition in the market, businesses resort to various tactics to lure the customers. What they do not realise is that when there are unhappy customers, they spread the news around and this will hurt their businesses in the long run. Besides, competing on price alone will not help them to survive. Having low margins mean they have to sell more.

What was supposed to be a happy experience turned out to be an upsetting one. I guess we cannot really blame others because we did not check properly.

shopping Sony Ericsson P1i GST Nets

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My Blog In Digital Life

Handphone prices: Check whether GST is included