Agora Commodities review from an actual purchase 2013-09-24

Agora Commodities News
From an actual purchase of 21st September 2014, a review is posted.
Dear bullion lovers, our fresh logo and website are coming soon! We want to provide you a better user experience to our website and service, and we are really looking forward to it and hope you will enjoy it as well. -- Agora Commodities
We are encouraging international customers to buy precious metals through the digitaltangibletrust.com platform. There is no international shipping charges associated with this service so it offers real savings to our international customers. -- Agora Commodities

I made a test purchase from Agora Commodities on Tuesday night, September 24, 2013 at 11:06pm.

Results: Agora Commodities review Sep 24 2013

Spot Price Silver	Store Price	Shipping (Calif to Tampa)	Add'l Fees	Total Cost Above Spot	Total Cost Delivered	Days to Ship	Total Days Order-to- Delivery
$21.80 24sep13	$25.58	Priority Mail Flat Rate®: $5.60	Shipping fee mishap Refunded! report	$22.95	$44.75	1	3

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Step-by-step review

Here is a walk-through of the purchasing experience on the Agora Commodities shopping cart. This will be a very detailed review of the buying experience at Agora Commodities, to include any quirks or weirdness I may have encountered during the process.

To make this purchase, I started from the Agora Commodities link on the home page of BuyGoldWithBitcoin. I arrived at the Agora Commodities home page, where I navigated to Products, then Silver and located the Silver American Eagle Coin.

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Setting the amount to 1 and clicking the Add To Cart button, it then says, “‘Silver American Eagle’ was successfully added to your cart.”

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At the top right of the page, you can change the currency selector to “Display product prices in Bitcoins.”

The amount changes to B⃦0.21.

(That’s a bitcoin symbol. If you can’t see it well, it looks like the dollar sign’s capital S with vertical bars, but uses a capital B instead. In this case, it didn’t display correctly on my computer, and appears in my screenshot like a square coded symbol.)

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When you mouseover the cart section, it will expand to show you the items and subtotal.

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Once on the cart page, you can check that your purchase items and quantities are correct.

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When on the cart page, you can use the selector to switch between displaying the amount in dollars or bitcoin.

Here I clicked Proceed To Checkout.

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I filled out the Billing Address.

I left the box checked that says, “Ship to billing address.”

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At the bottom, I checked the box to choose Pay With Bitcoin.

The Priority Mail Flat Rate® was showing B⃦0.15 in bitcoin.

(That’s the bitcoin symbol again. It doesn’t display correctly on these screenshots.)

Something unusual. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but when displayed in bitcoin, that shipping rate had jumped to the equivalent of $18.66! The exchange rate for bitcoin at the moment was $124.37. (Remember those days?) Doing the math, 124.37 times 0.15 equals 18.6555. Rounding the numbers comes out to $18.66, not the $5.60 I was expecting.

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At this point, I switched back to dollars to double check the pricing.

The Priority Mail Flat Rate® showed $5.60 in dollars.

The order total was $31.19.

At this point, the shipping rate looked correct, as long as it was displayed in dollars. I continued through the checkout.

I checked the box that said, “I have read and accept the terms & conditions.”

Then I clicked the Place Order button.

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I was shown the BitPay purchase widget, which was showing a total for my order of B⃦0.36 bitcoin.

Something unusual. That’s $44.75! I didn’t catch it, because at the time, with all the screenshots I was taking, and the prices of bitcoin and silver floating around in real time, I didn’t take the time to check all the math on a calculator. I missed it during checkout, but it seems I have found a fault in the shopping cart system.

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In another window, I opened my bitcoin wallet that I have on Blockchain.info.

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Back on the Agora Commodities BitPay purchase widget, I clicked on View Address to get the bitcoin address I would send payment to.

I selected the entire bitcoin payment address, and copied it to my clipboard with Ctrl+C.

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In my wallet, I pasted (Ctrl+V) the address into the To: box, and entered the bitcoin amount of 0.3600 into the left hand Amount: box.

The dollar equivalent of $44.88 was showing on the right, but I hadn’t noticed it was way too high.

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I clicked the green Send Payment button, and the progress indicator quickly moved to the right and completed.

I heard one beep.

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The Address: and To: boxes reset to blank after completion, but the dollar total remained.

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Returning to the Agora Commodities BitPay widget, there is now a green box in the middle that says,

“This invoice has been paid.”

Something unusual. The total just above the widget now shows a total of $0.36 paid, in dollars. That’s 36 cents!

Obviously, this is another bug somewhere in the bitcoin payment system, either on the part of BitPay or Agora Commodities, that effects how the total is displayed here. It would be correct if there were a bitcoin sign instead of a dollar sign.

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Over on my Blockchain.info Wallet Transactions page, I could see the not-yet-confirmed transaction in bitcoin, totaling B⃦0.36 bitcoin.

Switching the currency selector, it is displayed as $44.75 in dollars.

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The Agora Commodities cart now displays this page which says,

“Thank you. Your order has been received.”

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Within a few minutes, the wallet showed 17 confirmations of this transaction.

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Two business days later on Wednesday, September 25th at 5:46PM, the confirmation email arrived.

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Also on September 25, at 5:46PM, I received the USPS tracking email.

The sender is shown as JOSEPH CASTILLO, from one of those corporate addresses in Wyoming that is currently shared by 151,000 different businesses. This is one of the shared registered addresses that corporations can use in some states.

This caused some confusion initially, as I was not able to determine if this was the tracking number for the Agora Commodities order. There is no indication of the Agora Commodities company anywhere on this document. I had to Google Joseph’s name along with the company name to determine which shipment this was going to be.

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The order was delivered at 12:20 PM on Friday, September 25 2013 by USPS Priority Mail 2-Day™.

With the order being placed on Tuesday night, it would be received on Wednesday morning.  My coin was delivered to my door on Friday, just 3 business days after the order was received by Agora Commodities.

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Here is the coin as it arrived shipped in a clear plastic sleeve within a yellow padded postal envelope inserted within the USPS Priority Mail 2-Day™ shipping envelope.

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Here is a better scan of the actual coin. You can enlarge it to see the closeup detail on both sides.

It shows on the obverse some sort of darker corrosion or crud, and what looks like a fingerprint on the reverse. It has the appearance of an older coin considering it being a 2013 issue.

It is a common, but not particularly beautiful, example of the ASE, one of the world’s most popular silver coins, the 2013 American Silver Eagle.

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There was no customer satisfaction follow up or further communication from Agora Commodities.

UPDATE:

I was contacted by the owner of Agora Commodities without my having reached out to him. He had noticed the shipping overcharge mistake, and was offering those affected something as a refund. And so I was introduced to a favorite coin of mine, the Bitcoin Silver Specie Coin.

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Spot Price Silver	Store Price	Shipping (Calif to Tampa)	Add'l Fees	Total Cost Above Spot	Total Cost Delivered	Days to Ship	Total Days Order-to- Delivery
$21.80 24sep13	$25.58	Priority Mail Flat Rate®: $5.60	Shipping fee mishap Refunded! report	$22.95	$44.75	1	3

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