Drive-for-Parts.com now allowing purchases in multiple currencies

[DriveForParts]

Hi there!

We are pleased to annonce a significant improvement to our website driveforparts.com / drive-for-parts.com.

We developped a new payment widget that let you pay a product (hard drive, pcb or usb flash drive) directly in your currency.
This mean that when buying product you can directly use your PayPal balance in USD, EUR, RUB, GBP, CAD, PLN or CHF to pay without having to suffer conversion fees!



This animated gif above shows you what it looks like.

As you can see, we also integrated shipping costs in the widget, and there are three destination regions : World, Europe, and Switzerland.
We also simplified: all shipments are "registered priority" with tracking, transportation insurance, and signature on delivery
(as the Swiss Post will disable economic shipping on January 1st, 2022).

If you are in Russia, in Great Britain, Ireland or Turkey, and some other neighbouring countries you can still benefit from the lower shipping costs for Europe as it depends on postal pricing regions by the Swiss Post (and not on EU membership). In case of doubt, please ask us.

In the widget, the currency and the region are totally independant.
This is especially useful if your PayPal account is multicurrency, as your possibly received funds in a currency that isn't your main currency.
Instead of converting your funds and loosing money on poor exchange rates, spend them by buying hard drives from us!

Last but not least, for those of you who are not users of PayPal or prefer paying by bank transfer, we accept, without currency conversion, bank transfers in the following currencies : EUR, USD and CHF.

One last word about the currency rates we apply. There are based on both the average monthly rates published of the Swiss Federal Tax Administration, and those published by Xe.com. Something in the middle. (Much better rates than those applied by PayPal.) We update them around once a month.

Hope you like it!

 

[Jared]

The website looks nice, but the inventory is quite lacking. I'm sure that's something you plan to increase???

As a suggestion, perhaps sorting drives by their utility families would make it faster and easier for donor searching. I've always wished donor drives would do that.

 

[DriveForParts]

Hi Jared,

Thank you for your feedback, which is always welcome.

Yes, I'm constantly trying to improve the user experience, and increasing the size of the inventory if of course part of this.
I live in a small country of with 8.6 mio inhabitants, and the hard drives come from the domestic market, which is limited in size.
So, the size of the inventory increases, perhaps more slowly that it would in the US, but it increases for sure.
As of February 2022, there are 869 donors listed, from 406 different models.

With regards to your suggestion sorting drives by their utility families, I also had this idea in mind, but it required previously some intensive work on the database and some coding as well.
Work is completed for Western Digital drives, which are now categorized by full model name (e.g.WD5000AAKS-°°A7B° instead) instead of partial model name (e.g. WD5000AAKS which is ambiguous).

Very recently, I implemented that, for any model whose the family is known, if there are other published models belonging to the same family, they are listed and linked. These links are available on both the model page and on the unique donor pages.
These improvements were announced here today:
https://www.data-medics.com/forum/threads/drive-for-parts-com-now-allows-finding-hard-drives-in-same-family-other-improvements.4113/
Please have a look at the screenshots of improvements #2 and #5.
The result of this implementation is close to your suggestion.

If you cannot find a given donor, you can also browse the tree and click the nodes to expand them.
The families of the hard drives display on the thumbnails when they are known.

As for now, what keeps me from creating a "Families" tab is that families are not known for all hard drives.
So, unless to create a huge section "HDD with unknown family", it would mean that not all drives would be listed.
I may implement the"Search by family" feature later, maybe through the in-developement "Filter" tab.

There are still many improvements that I have in mind.
The website is almost written from scratch. Consequently, the developement takes more time than if I was using an ecommerce software like WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, or else.
But as a counterpart, I hope offering something different, more optimised in relation to the needs of the industry.
Thank you everyone for your patience. ;-)