September 2019 New Outfit Collection

One day I'll be able to check out....

I may have given up (ｰｰ') At best I get to the screen where you enter your credit card details and then it always fails. I mainly want the MSD boots, but egh, it's been almost an hour now.

 

Oh, I just got a new message, "currently undergoing maintenance. Please access again later."

Yeah I'm almost ready to give up. I sometimes get the maintenance message but it's just another error really and you have to keep trying. We've gotten to paypal but got an error trying to pay. =_=

I sent Volks an email complaining and I really hope they can fix the website. The old website was bad but at least I could pay for things and once you got them into the cart you had about 8hrs to process your payment. 

I mean this is only a small event so wouldn't have the kind of traffic that an After Event would have... 

It never goes past the card page for me either.

Don't put too much stock into the specific error message. I've been getting the "maintenance"/"heavy traffic" errors in both English and Japanese the whole time.  I really want the bat wing hoodie so I'll probably keep trying on and off for a while longer.

Tried a couple of times - and it error'd out at the complete order stage. Gonna have to say NOPE to this. I'll try again later - if what I want isn't sold out. Otherwise meh.

Ugh, that sounds like a repeat of the mess I went through the last time.

I hoped there was either something out of the ordinary wrong that wouldn't happen again, or that maybe they'd actually improve something about their website. There shouldn't be quite as many people trying to buy this time, since it's only outfits and no dolls. Last time, the outfits were up for two hours (I think, maybe misremember how long) before Rem and Ram, but it was so slow everyone was still trying to order after the dolls went live making it worse.

While I was trying to do my order every few minutes I did browse some other sites so I wasn't doing just that, but in total I spent right at 10 hours during that last clickwar before I successfully checked out. I don't know if that's dedication or insanity that I kept at it that long. I just really wanted Abyss Black outfits, and then lost the one I wanted most because of how long it took.

Edited September 21, 2019 by cfx

So I left it for a while and came back to try but still not working. Has anybody succeeded in buying something? 

Just tried again.

 

“Our website is currently experiencing heavy traffic. Please try again later.”

That's a new one.

1 minute ago, foo said:

Just tried again.

 

“Our website is currently experiencing heavy traffic. Please try again later.”

That's a new one.

I saw that at the end of the last event after a few hours of trying off and on.

2 minutes ago, foo said:

“Our website is currently experiencing heavy traffic. Please try again later.”

I got that one some of the time during that last event.

Are you getting the messages randomly in Japanese?

Still nothing here. I briefly got a new error, where the options on the payment screen were completely gone and replaced with a line saying something like "A method to select payment does not exist" in Japanese. 

1 hour ago, foo said:

I may have given up (ｰｰ') At best I get to the screen where you enter your credit card details and then it always fails. I mainly want the MSD boots, but egh, it's been almost an hour now.

 

Oh, I just got a new message, "currently undergoing maintenance. Please access again later."

I hope those boots don't sell out, and you can get them. I think they would look really good on Iori. They had them at the Sumika shop at Dolpa, and they look nicer in person than in the photos. The grain on the material is nice.

I get all the way to the PayPal window to make the payment, then when PayPal tries to direct me back to the Volks site, it crashes and the payment does not go through. It's... an infuriating loop. However, it seems everything in my cart is actually staying in my cart?

Oh dang my order finally went through. Good luck everyone!

Well - the Devil Hoodie is now out of stock. Oh well - i'll wait for it to pop up on Mandarake or get it elsewhere, providing the mark up isn't too much.

Edited September 21, 2019 by Tango_Six

My friggin' order FINALLY went through. After 6 or 7 failed PayPal attempts, I decided to see if my credit card would work... and it did. PHEW!

It looks like Volks may have reverted back to the old cart system, where so long as you got an item in your cart, it's yours. I say this because the hoodie is out of stock, but my friend still sees it in her cart (it's not being pulled out) even after refreshing multiple times. With the "first to check-out" system, items would vanish from your cart if they sold out. So, if they're back to "first to cart" system, we should see items pop in and out of stock as people decide what not to buy, carts time out, etc.

1 minute ago, Cauldroness said:

It looks like Volks may have reverted back to the old cart system, where so long as you got an item in your cart, it's yours. I say this because the hoodie is out of stock, but my friend still sees it in her cart (it's not being pulled out) even after refreshing multiple times. With the "first to check-out" system, items would vanish from your cart if they sold out. So, if they're back to "first to cart" system, we should see items pop in and out of stock as people decide what not to buy, carts time out, etc.

Not sure if this is true - it was in my cart then when I went to check out / complete payment it stated it's out of stock & can't be ordered.

38 minutes ago, Cauldroness said:

I get all the way to the PayPal window to make the payment, then when PayPal tries to direct me back to the Volks site, it crashes and the payment does not go through. It's... an infuriating loop. However, it seems everything in my cart is actually staying in my cart?

From the last event, this was how I assumed the order hadn't gone through, and then when it finally did I realized in my case it was dying before the final step where you actually confirm payment.

7 minutes ago, Cauldroness said:

It looks like Volks may have reverted back to the old cart system, where so long as you got an item in your cart, it's yours. I say this because the hoodie is out of stock, but my friend still sees it in her cart (it's not being pulled out) even after refreshing multiple times. With the "first to check-out" system, items would vanish from your cart if they sold out. So, if they're back to "first to cart" system, we should see items pop in and out of stock as people decide what not to buy, carts time out, etc.

As @Tango_Six says, unfortunately this probably isn't the case. In that last event I tried to buy three different styles of the Abyss Black outfits. Since I spent nearly 10 hours trying, I had them all in my cart, and shortly before I finally completed checkout they all still showed in stock. When checkout finally worked for me, at some step in the process a page refreshed (instead of going to the next page) with a warning message in red about how one item in my cart was no longer available. I had to manually remove that item before I could proceed.

17 minutes ago, Tango_Six said:

Well - the Devil Hoodie is now out of stock. Oh well - i'll wait for it to pop up on Mandarake or get it elsewhere, providing the mark up isn't too much.

If you are in the US, it should be part of the Volks USA LA Dolpa After Event that's at the beginning of next month. That will be lottery so not as frustrating as this.

18 minutes ago, cfx said:

If you are in the US, it should be part of the Volks USA LA Dolpa After Event that's at the beginning of next month. That will be lottery so not as frustrating as this.

Unfortunately, I'm in Australia, so no Volks USA for me. Which is what makes the "issues", to put it nicely, with the Volks webstore kinda frustrating. Well, some of the Ash Rose school stuff showed up on Mandarake a few days back, so perhaps some of this stuff will as well. Maybe they'll restock the Hoodie sometime in the future - like how they restocked the Marine Tricolor & Swimwear outfits.

Next month's collection will be interesting - I do want one of the sports outfits, and the jeans would be nice. But it will be another exercise in frustration I think.....

Australia--that sounds familiar I bet you already mentioned that and I had forgotten.

I think Mandarake gets nearly everything, sooner or later. I've gotten pretty much all the older Volks outfits I wanted from them, though one I got very recently took about a year and a half of looking.

Those small restocks kind of puzzle me. I doubt they get another batch made of anything, but perhaps they just redistribute some of what's in the stores especially if more of some items are left over from the Dolpa after events. Who knows.

With the old cart system, you could sometimes buy things that reappeared about a day after the clickwars, because items that people had in their carts being held would go back into inventory if those people didn't check out, or couldn't check out because of payment issues, or whatever.

We are lucky in the US that most of the time we get two chances to buy this stuff. Last year I know some of the doll lotteries were held at the same time, or at least overlapped, so you really could only enter one of those though.

Maybe Australia will eventually get one of those DD friend shops. There must be at least some market for it in Australia as there are a number of members here from there; offhand besides you I know of @Monty.

5 hours ago, BeyondTime said:

I hope those boots don't sell out, and you can get them.

They're gone (｡-_-｡) 

What a waste of time this event was for us. We work all week and this event starts at 2am for us so we're pretty tired and could really do with the sleep but after several hours of trying the items we wanted sold out. I don't know if maybe the website works better for people living in Japan with the better ping or if it's just as bad? Anyway until they fix the website I'm probably going to avoid the events. We've been buying from Volks for about 9 years now and it's never been this bad. Luckily for Christmas I'll be in Tokyo so I might have better luck then. 

The old website wasn't ideal but it sure seems to work better than this new one. 

I’m surprised to hear the event went this badly. I’ve come to expect it for clickwar doll releases and sometimes after events but for a regular outfit collection?? Did the website get worse or was here just a huge spike in new Volks fans?

I forgot it was even happening because I’m in Italy and so the event started early in the morning instead of the usual time for me but it looks like the only thing I wanted sold out which hasn’t happened for a long time. Hopefully my friend can pick it up at Akiba next week but anyway I continue to be extremely disappointed with the new site and am really not looking forward to the next time I wanna buy something unless that changes.

also an australian friend shop would be nice (there is a NZ one after all) but I kinda shudder to think what the prices would be like and if it would even offer any benefit financially (unless the exchange rate continues to get worse and worse, which it probably will).

5 hours ago, cfx said:

The old website wasn't ideal but it sure seems to work better than this new one. 

From what I was told, the old website had a flaw that allowed people to put stuff in their carts without going through the pages. That allowed scalpers to buy up the hot items before customers had much of a chance. That might not have affected normal clothing availability, but I'm betting it impacted dolls and limited outfits like Ribbon Girl.