You may have noticed that our USD payment processor broke a couple of days ago. Its been a frantic time at MrSnuff HQ as we have been liaising back and forth with the payment provider’s tech support. Unfortunately they could not come up with a fix, or at least not within two days, so I made the decision to swap the site over to taking GBP because we do have a functioning GBP processor.
The site still displays the prices in USD, at least until you get to the checkout where you see the price in GBP. This can be a bit disconcerting but we hope people will get used to it. There is a warning notice in the cart explaining this.
Another side effect is that the USD prices displayed will now fluctuate according to the whims of the USD-GBP exchange rate and also the prices don’t sit neatly on the xx.49 and xx.99 boundaries like they used to.
To be clear: any order made since the problem started has not been charged (because that was the problem). We will be contacting all the affected customers tomorrow explaining what happened and inviting them to re-order with a nice discount.
At least we are now back up and running and selling snuff again, but we are really very sorry this happened.
The original GBP price was reduced by 20% to remove UK VAT. The prices were then rounded to the nearest xx.49 or xx.99. That price is the base GBP price on the site but it is dynamically converted by the software to USD based on the current exchange rate. That is the price the customer sees.
It may have been the rounding step that has made the difference, but that wouldn’t be a huge difference. Is this what you are seeing?
I will go check anyway. The intention was not to raise the prices but things got pretty frantic at MrSnuff HQ because we were losing so many sales, so mistakes may have been made. I am sorry if that is the case.
The GBP Price for a roll of Siberia is £58.49. FYI: you can check the GBP prices on mrsnuff.co.uk.
£58.49 - 20% VAT = £46.79
£46.79 = $61.37
$61.60 (the US price) - $61.37 = $0.23
That gives a $0.02 difference per can of Siberia which I think is probably in the ballpark for FX fluctuations.
That said, over the weekend I will go check to make sure we didn’t mess something up. We had to change over a thousand prices so I used a pretty basic formula to do that. It may have caused issues with some of the products.
Thanks for helping though, I really appreciate you taking the time.
Oh no! You are totally right. That’s exactly the mistake I was talking about. I am sorry. The prices were taken from our UK site, which means the Odens products that contain tobacco have UK excise applied. Of course they do.
Its too late tonight UK time to fix this now but I will get on it first thing tomorrow. That was a stupid mistake.
I will review all the prices tomorrow. I have to sort out the excise issue anyway.
To be honest we were just glad to get the site back up and running. Its been a bit of a mare these last few days with our USD processor dying on us. We have pivoted the whole company over to GBP - bank accounts, payment processors, websites, everything.
That’s the UK excisable product prices corrected now. The excise has been removed and the US snus prices are back down to sane levels. The UK tax is outrageous really. If you are a US customer be you should be thankful. Time for a Boston Snus Party anybody?
It turns out that you were correct. The price was too high. There were problems with calculation I was using as it did not subtract the non-optional markup the supplier enforces on UK sales.
Once that was removed the US prices have returned to something a bit more palatable e.g. $29.11 for a roll of 10 Siberia -80 Degrees White Dry Portion, down from over $60!
