We price ourselves in the middle of the market, while still providing a high level of service. We recently compared our pricing to that of Melbourne IT’s, Australia’s largest domain name registration service – www.melbourneit.com.au
Domain name registration
.com.au – 2 years
Melbourne IT – $140.00
OPMC – $66.00
.com – 1 year
Melbourne IT – $75.00
OPMC – $27.50
.co.nz – 1 year
Melbourne IT – $110.00
OPMC – $43.95
Web Hosting – Monthly
Basic Plan
Melbourne IT – $25.94
OPMC – $9.95
E-mail – Monthly
Minimum plan
Melbourne IT – $19.95 (20 e-mail address minimum plan)
OPMC – $2.15 (1 e-mail address*)
Overall, we were a minimum of 50% cheaper on pricing than Melbourne IT, and if you want to stretch your dollar further you should consider switching to OPMC.
Click here to visit OPMC Australia.
Click here to visit OPMC New Zealand.
*Pricing is comparable when you have 20 e-mail addresses with us, however many clients have just one or two, so the minimum expense with Melbourne IT is significant.
(Pricing in AUD)
Telecom New Zealand’s Ferrit has been closed down for the most part.
This follows a significant and long advertising campaign to build up the reputation of the online store.
Companies should stick to what they do best. In this case Telecom should have put the money towards NZ’s dismal internet services.
Large companies who try to do something outside their business model, ie Telecom trying to do something fun and “entrepreneurial” should not bother. If the project doesn’t match their business, it’s going to be difficult to make it successful.
I was recently on the eettf.net blog when I found this video. When a large corporation such as Microsoft tries to appeal to the masses, this is the outcome:
I thought this was a joke, but it is actually real:
This is, regrettably the outcome of a company who is good at one thing, trying to compete with companies who are good at similar things, but have a different market audience.
I assume this is something they thought could compete with easy to use software from companies such as Apple.
I am tempted to say, this is terrible. It is a ridiculous idea. But what if Apple were to make something similar, first, hype it up and target it differently to their customers, with say a tie in to itunes and the ipod? It could work. But that’s because they would make it for their target audience. I think the problem here is that Microsoft is targetting someone else’s target market. They need to establish a presence in that target market first, which they haven’t done.
Microsoft is really good at Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows. They should really stick to that, improving it so it works well and is more useful. And perhaps create software you can plug in to it, which is useful.
At times like these, when I experience internet problems, I am inspired to comment on the state of Telecommunication Companies and their application of technology over time. And how useful is it?
Some quick observations:
-Vodafone Australia phone support attempts to resolve customers problems without having a staff person speak to them. The way in which this process has been established means that it is actually incredibly difficult to speak to a person, when the problem “category” you are experiencing is in their system, but the actual problem you have, is not, or requires you to speak to a person.
-Vodafone New Zealand has a person answering the phone. They resolve issues much more quickly.
-Telstra Bigpond Australia efficiently answers the phone, however today calling technical support I find myself talking to a machine. The voice recognition machine asks me what my type of internet is. Once I’ve advised, the voice then asks me, rhetorically whether I’ve been having problems with my internet or e-mail today. And if so, the issue has been identified and is being worked on. And, I am told, they don’t know when it will be fixed.
This system works great, to a certain extent. To then pursue this further, ie, to enquire as to the current status, the system fails on me. It goes through a very well thought out, yet entirely useless, process of determining what my problem is. When all I was trying to do was find out what the latest situation was.
-TelstraClear New Zealand, prefers to keep people waiting on hold for a long period of time. This exacerbates the issue when the internet stops working and one can only but sit there and wonder when it will be resolved, rather than making any concrete progress. TelstraClear did have a great feature which I used to use, which allowed you to leave a message so someone could call you back. I found this very reliable.
-To my most recent knowledge, all these companies are now allowing online payment, and they bill online too.
You can check your current balance online, even change plans online, these things are very handy. Many of the web based services they offer do add to the experience.
However, I would recommend they all consider doing some research into how people use and benefit from this technology. For example, all people I have spoken to about the Vodafone Australia automated phone process, do not like it. In fact, unless you just want to know what your balance is on your account, I think it fails in many respects. It doesn’t allow you to easily speak to a human, when you have something outside the square box of the system, you need to enquire about.
This has personally caused me a lot of frustration.
Technology provides us all with many benefits, but big companies need to spend more time on planning these systems. As it is not the technology that makes it work well, it’s the application and design of that technology that will save money, and customers’ time.
We export our bank statements from internet banking to our accounting software Xero every few days.
However, after experiencing some issues with double ups in transaction information I looked into the problem further to try and figure out what was going on.
It quickly became obvious what the problem was:
-If you view or export statements for a period that includes a weekend, say Friday – Sunday, you will see all transactions that occurred during that time.
-But as any transactions that happen during a weekend are not processed until a weekday, when you view or export statements for the start of the week – say Monday to Wednesday – it will show all the transactions that actually occurred during the previous Saturday and Sunday.
The results of this is that if you export for say Friday – Sunday, then export your bank statements for the following Monday – Wednesday, all the transactions that happened on Saturday – Sunday will appear twice.
Thus stuffing up your accounting.
This sort of error highlights the problems with poor web based software testing.
Export in one lot for Friday – Wednesday and you don’t experience the problem.
For a bank, this sort of basic error is avoidable and unacceptable. Next time you’re using internet banking, be sure to check that your transactions are being processed correctly!
Just because internet banking is secure, doesn’t mean the person writing the software that makes it work has covered all bases.
Apple has recently announced that the 3G iPhone is coming to Australia and New Zealand in July 2008.
Apple have really nailed it on the head with this phone. They have taken into consideration feedback from current users and groups, and the outcome is a much better, much cheaper solution, that is now also being sold downunder and will make all our lives much easier.
This will definitely be up there on my list of purchases for July. In business you can’t afford to be inefficient or not have up to the date information, and the iPhone is not only an ideal alternative to Blackberry or Palm based solutions, but it is much better. With the advent of “3G”, or essentially broadband capabilities, this phone will be a very attractive choice for both individuals and businesses in the second half of 2008.
It seems as though Telecom Xtra has made another, more significant than normal anti-competitive action by requiring all its customers to record into the Yahoo! Xtra e-mail system any e-mail addresses they use for their business.
So, if you have a professional e-mail address for your business, which is a service not provided by Xtra, you must now log all these e-mail addresses into Xtra’s system.
Under the guise of “Online Identity Theft Protection” or some such thing, Xtra has made it a requirement that in order to send e-mails from your business e-mail account, if your internet connection has been provided by Xtra you must log any e-mail addresses you intend to use, with the Xtra service.
At the same time, Xtra has announced plans for a stronger push into the business market, offering customers the ability to do all their business e-mail hosting and web hosting through Xtra.
Now, as Xtra will now know all e-mail addresses for all their customers, they can easily promote to them the “benefits” of changing their web hosting and e-mail services to Xtra.
Xtra now blocks, as standard, 50% of our services as a web and e-mail hosting services provider. Our customers must send all e-mails through the Xtra service, rather than our service. When a problem occurs with sending e-mail, our customers should be able to call us to resolve this. Rather, we have to send them on to the Xtra “Help”-desk, in order to get the issue resolved. Their enquiries are frequently sent overseas to people who have not been trained correctly, therefore the issue is sent back to us to resolve – which we can’t resolve as it’s not our service.
Needless to say, Xtra is limiting what its customers can do and restricting their ability to easily use a provider other than Xtra for their e-mail services.
In the interests of our customers, our interests, and the interests of other providers in the marketplace, we have lodged a formal complaint with the Commerce Commission in regards to what we see as being anti-competitive behaviour by Telecom in this matter. Watch this space for some action over this monopolistic behaviour in the future.
I have two e-mail accounts with Xtra, and it was recently brought to my attention that they had “upgraded” their system.
I went to log in to my Xtra e-mail, a relatively painless process for the last few years. I was confronted with a login screen and was relieved as I had read they had made some major upgrades that had had major impacts on customer’s services.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. I was then told that my web browser was rare, or something to that effect and that I would not get the optimum service with the browser I was using (Safari on the Mac). I chose to ignore this message, and continued on.
I was then introduced to what seems like a 5 step process:
1) Register
2) Download
3) Personalise
4) Summary
5) Get Online
Why do I have to go through this process to check my webmail? Something that should be a simple process which has just become seemingly impossible, inconvenient and annoying.
I was asked to enter my basic details – e-mail address, name and phone number. Despite entering this information correctly, I was given the following error messages:
Despite reentering the information again and again I realised I was not getting anywhere. So I switched over to Firefox for the Mac.
After the connection to Yahoo timed out, giving me an error message, I tried again and was confronted with the same page “Tell us about yourself” (I am a customer of yours why do I need to tell you about myself when all I want to do is check my personal e-mail?)
As the details were pre-filled, I pressed the “Continue” button. Once this was eventually processed, this time I was presented with a page asking me to confirm my identity. Ironically, the page is titled “Help us help you”. One would have thought the best way they could help us is to not require this sort of re-registration process to check our e-mails.
Another wait while the new “improved” Yahoo!Xtra service had a think about my security question and date of birth. Note at this stage I am still on “Step 1″ as described above and have been trying to check my webmail for 30 minutes now.
Success! Yahoo has processed this information and takes me to the next page! Which is empty…
I try to refresh the page to resolve this issue, and come back to my original issue on Safari, with some more errors thrown in for good measure:
Pressing the “Continue” button again, I get an error message…again. And again. And again. I cannot use my e-mail.
35 minutes and counting, I am reluctant to continue but want to check my personal e-mail. So time to resort to Windows.
Going into Windows and logging in, I am first asked whether I want to add “sub accounts” for my family, a significantly different message from that I had on the mac. But I am not onto “Step 2 – Download” so at least we are making progress.
I now have to download “Yahoo Bubble” to check my e-mail. Redundant, more time and heavy on reducing usability. Seems to be the only way for me to check e-mail so I am going for it. Have now been spending 45 minutes on this.
I am now asked Whether I want Typical setup (which installs software i neither want nor need), or the custom setup “Advanced users only”. Custom setup lets me install neither of these pieces of software, so I select this option.
I agree to yet another software agreement, which prints to a record 26 pages. Who is going to read this?
Am asked some more questions, after which I wait for the next page to come up for a few minutes. At this point it seems like I almost might be at the end of this ordeal.
I am logged in, and faced with lots of information irrelevant to my e-mail – which is what the webmail was for in the first place. I see a small item on the left marked as “Mail”, and click on it.
Voila! I have been invited to try the “ALL-NEW Yahoo!Xtra Pro MAIL”. There is an image on this page, which I wait another few minutes to load.
Not wanting to get into more time wasting exercises (I am now up to 1 hour of this process), I decline this “to be missed” opportunity.
I have finally been able to enter webmail. Now that I’ve gone through this experience, I get to do it all over again for my other Xtra e-mail account – looking forward to it.
Regrettably, many NZ companies rely on Xtra e-mail for their business correspondence. Imagine having to go through this sort of process in the middle of a busy working day to check your e-mail via webmail? Telecom is certainly not making any friends with this sort of time wasting rubbish.
Telecom Xtra has an infamous history of making it difficult to do business using their services. Our customers cannot send e-mail through our servers if they are Xtra customers (they block our service to our customers), e-mails get lost (up to 50% of international e-mail), and service is slow. Such a big company should be setting an example rather than using their size to stifle competition and service levels.
