Welcome retro gaming fan!
We are please to announce our first ever big change on our price points for all our collections sold at the website. There are many reasons why we’ve decided to make this change. All of them we think are beneficial to our customers.
The first reason is the lowering costs of microSD cards and some Hard Drives. Since the height of the pandemic, the cost for these items reduced a bit, and therefore, allow for us to reduce our costs as well. Since our main goal is to share retro gaming and make it easy for our customers, we think it is just fair to share that reduction with our clients.
Second, it will allow first-time subscribers to our mailing list to use their coupons on products with reduced prices. Since the coupon does not allow them to be used with items on sale, we thought that a permanent price change would benefit our new clients a lot more.
But are announcing not only significant price changes, but we are changing a few things on the collections themselves.
Orders that come with a MicroSD or SD card will no longer come with a manual. Our manuals get outdated quickly and they are a lot of work to edit. We believe a digital delivery of the manuals makes a lot more sense. WE are still keeping our DVD-style cases with colorful cover, but the manual will not be present on the boxes anymore. Some recent orders shipped already without manual, because most of them do not represent well what’s inside the microSD card. New orders stating today will have their manuals/instructions in a link to a page in our site, where we can make changes and updates on the fly and they can always be accessed by the clients.
Longer production times. In order to charge less for our products, we have to implement a slightly longer production and delivery time. We no longer have the ability to ship items in 2 to 3 days like before. Constantly we have customers expecting items too soon and they complain about our shipments being late. Retro Mini Store is not a large-scale operation with many employees.
This is a work done mostly by volunteers and with little to no profit at all. I don’t live off of this website, and it only exists as as ways to share my own emulation creations to the masses, and with that it comes a cost that is not only monetary, but there is a time cost. Everyone involved with Retro Mini Store has a “real life” job or goes to school, etc, so time is of essence.
With that in mind, we are stretching a little bit the delivery times (look at each product page about it’s particular delivery time frame), and we are limiting our trips to the post office to once a week. Always on Fridays or Saturdays every week we will ship products that are ready to be shipped. As always, when a product is ready to be shipped, we will purchase the labels online and the clients will receive their tracking numbers by e-mail.
Adjustments on Shipping Costs
Since we opened up about 5 years ago, shipping costs have increased. We’ve being doing free shipping for all orders in the U.S., and $20 flat rate shipping for the rest of the world, regardless of the size of the order. But since the pandemic, shipping costs have escalated everywhere. To ship a Hard Drive to Japan, for example, went from about $39 to nearly $80. This means we can’t keep the same arrangement for shipping purchases from the site, but we have not decided yet the best new formula. We will unveil new shipping costs in the next few days. In the meantime, enjoy free shipping and also flat rate for international orders!
No more sales?
New, lower price points and a coupon for new customers, means that we are not going to be performing sales anytime soon. Enjoy the prices are they are from now on! We might do one-off item sales, but right now, we are suspending all sales.
RMS