The Not-so-Secret Project: Part 2 - Affiniti

My next stop, literally minutes after placing my order with FabulouStreet was www.AffinitiNailandBeauty.com another site which retails Nfu Oh as their major brand. Not somewhere I'd really heard of much before, but I stumbled across a link on a UK nail bloggers site and went to take a peak.

Note: As it's a UK site all prices were marked in pounds so I've just run the numbers through XE.com for a comparison.

Reunited at last: Nfu ohs 38, 52, 61 & 53

Price - 4/5
Unlike FabulouStreet the collections here had different prices. A bottle of the Nfu Oh Hologram collection (incidently, as a side note, I totally agree with Polish Pixie that they are *the* best holos anywhere) will set you back £8.75/€9.97/$14.09, the Opal collection (aka flakies as its known by bloggers everywhere!) are £6.75/€7.69/$10.87 and the regular Paint collection cost £5.50/€6.27/$8.86. So while technically cheaper than its competitors I do feel that the holos are possibly a tad overpriced.

Nfu Oh 61: Who's the holo-est of them all?

Variety -5/5
Yet again a site that seems to have every single Nfu Oh made available for sale. Although after closer inspection no sign of the infamous flakey 051... But I won't mark them down for not having 1 particular colour available, though I'd be interested to know why not.

Affiniti

Website - 3/5
Affiniti has a nice professional looking website. It's clean, its work friendly (as long as you're not looking at the main page you could probably get away with the boss walking past and not notice you're looking at nail polish) and its fairly self explanatory. You want Nail polish? click the button that says Nail polish. Simples!

One thing I did find peturbing is that there's no actual customer service type page on the site listing important information such as whether they ship internationally and what to do if your package doesn't arrive.

My only other gripe with the site was with their shopping basket system. Its probably related to my 'shopping style' but during about an hour browsing the site, adding things in as I went the basket managed to wipe itself about 5 times and by the end I was so frustrated I just wrote down what I wanted and chucked everything into it when I was ready to pay.

Nfu Oh 38

Customer Service - 5/5
Now this is where Affiniti really shine out above most other companies. As I mentioned in my previous post, DHL utterly hate me. They refuse to admit that my address exists and when I wrote to complain to them about my one other previous encounter where they delivered it to the right number in the wrong street in the wrong town they said "lol we can't help you, complain in French!" and that was that.

So as expected my poor parcel of nail polish started its long journey to me on January 5th and by January 8th I was having problems. I contacted Interparcel, who are the courier company for Affiniti and they provided me with my DHL shipping number. Two failed deliveries later and I'm wound up (boyfriend will attest to this, to the point where the words package and delivery were banned in the appartment for over a week).

So I send Affiniti an email asking what their lost package/refund policy is and I get a very nice response almost immediately saying they'll get Interparcel to poke DHL and see what's going on. The weekend passes, I get another email saying that I should hopefully be receiving my parcel soon and to let them know if everything's ok. The same day I get a call from DHL saying "hey we found your address but you weren't home!" (yes, sadly some of us have to work to pay for our nail polish habit!) and voila 4 days later I get woken up by a delivery man.

The point to this story is that Affiniti have great customer service. They care about people, which is super rare these days and they were by far the most helpful of all the Etailers I dealt with in this project.

Nfu Oh 53. Very sheer. 4 coats, no topcoat

Shipping - 3/5
The DHL thing really wasn't their fault, and Affiniti went out of their way to help me resolve it so I'm certainly not going to mark them down for that. However....

The actual cost of shipping is...interesting. According to their shipping page I should have been charged £8.00 as I meet the criteria for Europe Zone 1: France? check. Less than 30kg - check.

Yet at the actual checkout you get two options for shipping costs: UK or International. Obviously I selected International, and the price of shipping suddenly shot up to £14.95. Flat rate. For anywhere that's not UK. What the hell? That's a whole extra bottle of polish I could have got right there.

Packaging Success.

Packaging - 5/5
The bottles were packed in a box that had a little section for each of them, surrounded by packing peanuts and an air cushion all inside a larger box. Perfect packaging and free storage all in one!

Nfu Oh 53 bottle pic. Click to see a close up of the flakies!

Overall - 83%
When I started this project Affiniti were an unknown quantity to me. I feel like I've gotten to know them a *whole* lot better in the last week or so ;)

Overall the shopping experience was fine, I was very happy that they put in so much effort to help reunite me with my polishes and that even after the bottles had been bounced between vans and depots for the last 3 weeks they had been packed so well that they were all fully in tact AND right at the bottom of the box they included a sachet of free glitter (I love freebies, who doesn't?) as well as their business card.

I'm still confused over the shipping prices, and I think that would be a major factor in my considering shopping with them again, although as DHL now recognise my address I think that would be the only thing stopping me. Of course if you are a UK reader then I would highly highly recommend them, even over FabulouStreet just for the pure ease of having them deliver from the same country and the guarentee that if something does go wrong they'll help you fix it.

That's all from me for now. Happy Polishing!