[LuckyRVA]

my girlfriend ordered me a MOMO shift knob from Mini Mania as part of my birthday present last week(last Sunday 5/11). The order has yet to go through their system despite their online order system being open 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

They claim their computer system has been down for a week...who the hell let's their system go down for a whole week!?!?

Anyone else here make the mistake of ordering anything from Mini Mania online in the past week?


Jason

[MiniMan7]

I didn't make the mistake of ordering through them, but I did notice their website has been down for a while.

[xplode]

Quote:

Originally posted by LuckyRVA
They claim their computer system has been down for a week...who the hell let's their system go down for a whole week!?!?

from netcraft.com:

"The site www.minimania.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000"

that should explain it

seriously though, their provider is www.racine-web.com, should be pretty simple to find out from them if there's been a weeklong outage for minimania. if not, they're blowing smoke and i'd steer clear of them... always check who you're doing business with online.

[Paul]

The website for MiniMania/Spares was down for quite a while, I think last week.

[kenatMiniMania]

LuckyRVA,

Have your girlfriend call me at 800-946-2642 and I'll be happy to resolve the problem with the MOMO Shift Knob order. If you prefer, you can email me (kens@minimania.com) your phone number and I'll be happy to call you.

Our computer system has never been down for a week, so let me help get your order out!

Ken

[Cobra_S]

Has anyone tried their exhausts? or boost upgrade? do they sell chip? or are they not worth wasting time with?

thanks guys...

[cooper4us]

I think MINIMANIA is great as they are one of the oldest aftermaket parts providers for the Classic Mini and now the new BMW MINI. Great service, parts, no problems. Prices tend to be a bit on the high side.

[sifl_n_ollie]

I too had difficulties with the minimania website. They were the only ones selling OEM oil filters online - I tried to order 2 filters and was unable too. The website was not functioning properly. I even tried other browsers and platforms to see if perhaps it was a bug for one system type, with no avail.

I cannot speak to their reputation as one of the oldest aftermarket providers for mini's, but, as a web developer I can safely say that their website is very poor.

Minimania here is a bit of advice - if you are going to be an online retailer take care to provide an easy to use and reliable experience for your customers. Unreliable backend programming and less than user friendly front end design for online retailers is like going into your local warehouse store where the signage is confusing and there seems to never be anyone around to help you and then to top it off there are 50 checkout lanes and only 2 of them are open with lines to the back of the store - safe to say not many people will return.

[kenatMiniMania]

sifl_n_ollie,

Thank you for your input. We take any reports of web site problems very seriously. Your comments have been forwarded to our site developer for analysis.

As a web developer, you already know the challenges of 'duplicating' a problem before it can be corrected. We appreciate any input when a problem occurs, especially if details can be provided to help with the debug. Without your input, we never would have known of the problem.

Thanks again,
kens@minimania.com

[LuckyRVA]

Just wanted to update, I finally got my Momo knob today.

Now I'm finding out it doesn't fit completely flush where the stock knob fit at the base. Sigh.




Jason

[sifl_n_ollie]

kenatMiniMania

Thanks for the reply. 3 things:
1. test early, test often, and then test again.
2. the problem I was having - when I went to add an item to the cart it would not add. It would time out and send an error message. I dont recall off-hand the specifics of the error message as it was a few weeks ago (sorry). As I mentioned before I tried various setups to see if it helped - mac OSX running safari 1.0, mozilla 1.1, and explorer 5.2 - pc (windows 2000 professional) running explorer 5.0, and Netscape 6.2.
3. I found the organization of the information on your hompage to be rather daunting. It was not clear to me where I needed to go. In a couple of the browsers (safari, netscape, and mozilla) there was no main naviagation unless you scrolled all the way to the bottom. The search feature worked which was the only reason I found the oil filters as I had tried locating them linearly but did not.

I know most developers say that developing for PC's running a recent version expolorer is good enough since the idea is that it has higher penetration into the market but I think there have been a number of threads here talking about the number of Mac users who are also MINI fans so please dont forget all us Mac people.

Thanks for respecting all our feedback.