Random

Surely there are hundreds of other websites you could buy your patches and biker gear from so why buy from The Cheap Place. I’m going to list of the reasons I can think of below.

• There are never any shipping charges for USA orders.
• International orders all have a $1.99 handling fee for any size order. No additional shipping charges on top of that.
• There are no minimums required. Yes you could send someone a gift or buy yourself a patch for as low as $2.99
• All products you can purchase are in stock. I do not use drop shipping. You know your order is processed on the same day you place your order.
• USPS First Class and Priority shipping (all for free) makes sure you get your order within 2-3 business days (compare to UPS Ground which usually takes a longer)
• Safe shopping. All submitted critical information protected by 256 bit secured socket layer. Site is scanned daily by TrustGuard. No customers payment information is stored on my databases. You can be sure that your card will only be charged for the order you placed. There are no recurring subscription fees.
• The Cheap Place is a member of the BBB.
• Talk to a real person right away. Call me at (386) 383 8992.
• Google Checkout, Paypal and Money Orders also accepted as forms of payment.
• Wholesale Accounts available upon request. Buy in bulk cheap with a low minimum. Sell on Ebay at markup. No business licenses requires. (Florida customers would need to submit a Resale Certificate to avoid having to pay sales tax)
• New Patches added monthly. Majority of the new patches are all customer requests. If you don’t find something you’ve been looking for, let me know. I’ll try to come up with something.
• No Corporate treatments. This is a family owned store. My name is Erhan. I have no employees, no warehouses. Just my family and the garage. That’s how I manage to offer low prices.
• Don’t have the money to buy patches? Write me a story and get patches for free. Read more about how to buy patches for free. No Gimmicks Whatsoever!
• Superior Quality in products is never compromised. Surely there may be others selling the same looking patch at lower prices, but when you compare the quality of the products and the service there is no match for The Cheap Place.
• Aside from my own creations I offer other manufacturers products. No knock offs here. Harley Patches, Good Sports Patches, Guardian Bells are all 100% Genuine Brand name products of the highest quality offered here at The Cheap Place.
• I do not sit around and ship once or twice a week. All orders ship within 24 hours of placing so you get them as quickly as possible. (In the rare case of an anomaly in shipping you will be notified prior to checking out).

It has been a week or so since I last blogged about what is going on here at The Cheap Place. My family and I are currently still visiting my parents over in Turkey and enjoying the sunshine. Well not today at least as it has been overcast all day (no global warming here I’m happy to report).

I’ve been following up on World Cup Soccer and looking forward to the final between Spain and Holland. My son is rooting for Spain as he claims they’ve found Florida, so why not pick a side. I’ve heard it’s the first time Spain is in the finals so hopefully they will be the ones raising the golden cup.

Moving along to what is new on my site. Sales are soaring and I thank my neighbors son Ankur for shipping out orders daily as they come in. I myself will be back in Florida on the 20th and am pretty excited to release a whole bunch of new patches. It’s not all vacation over here, in fact I spent most of the day yesterday designing new patches to be released late July. All of them are pretty much small patches as I’m not quite the artist. However, I do have some good news. I’ve been talking to a tattoo artist friend of mine. When I get back we are going to sit down and start a relationship. Soon I will be getting into releasing detailed artworks of large back patches as well. As you might have noticed I currently sell Hot Leathers brand patches to make up for my lack of large patch designs but I cannot wholesale them. I used to sell Lethal Threats nice embroidered patch designs as well, but I had been accused of counterfeiting their products when I had been purchasing them from their distributor down in Florida. All I asked for was an apology for their rude accusation but when I didn’t get one I decided to discontinue them. Business isn’t all about making money for me. It’s about having fun and enjoying taking care of others. It really lightens up my day when I get a message from a customer thanking me for getting their patches so quickly. That’s right I do not sit around waiting for orders to pile up. I’ll be working on something and will get a message on my blackberry about a new order that’s just come. I will drop everything fill the order and drive it down to the post office before it closes. I believe doing business like this will pay off for me and my family. Nothing will make me more happy than to see my son and my daughters take over the business one day.

As for the near future there are going to be more choices of patches and other great biker gear for my loyal customers all priced as cheap as I can afford to offer them you. This year I will concentrate on my biker customers. Soon enough you will find everything you’ve been looking for from all sorts of different patches to stickers to T-shirts. I would love to continue on telling you all about my future plans, but right now I hear my mom screaming about dinner being ready. So until next time, Ride Safe.

Thank you for showing support by purchasing from my online store. Take care everyone.

On my way to becoming a US citizen pretty soon and the fact that Turkey is not in the World Cup I’ve been rooting for team USA in the World Cup Soccer 2010. Just finished watching the great game against Algeria and all hats off. Congratulations to the entire team USA. The win was definitely well deserved. So many missed opportunities it would have been a real bummer to go back early after all that effort.

All Soccer fans of USA please feel free to comment. Perhaps this is the year to show the rest of the world that Soccer is not just for Europeans and South Americans. We can do it too!

Best of luck to team USA in the second round. Hope to see another highly entertaining match in a few days. Would love to see America win it and I can make a commemorative patch to celebrate this special year. Let’s see.

It has been about a week since I last posted something on the blog. It has really been a wonderful past few weeks with lots of new wholesale patch customers I’ve gathered lately since I’ve been ranking quite well on google these days. I must say I have to place orders more frequently with my manufacturer in order to keep patches in stock.

I’m getting ready to take the family over to Turkey for a month to visit my parents. I have to work double time and get everything organized before I leave the headquarters which happens to be my house:). Good news is while I’m away orders will resume to ship daily as usual. From the way things look I may not be able to ship orders out between June 20-25. Other than that, I will try my best to have your orders ship out the day they are received. I know how important it is to get your online orders in as quickly as possible and I strive my best to achieve this all the time.

You might not be aware but this is a family business. That’s right, there are no employees here. Just me and my wife helping out to make sure every customer is taken care of properly. I’m originally from Turkey and I do have parents over there whom we like to visit and take the grandkids over to twice a year. Once in the summer and once at Christmas time. Traveling with a family of 5 can add up to $7000 in airline tickets so we try to stay at least a month to make the most of it.

Well going back to the good news. I’ve actually trained my neighbors son (who is actually a great friend of my son’s) to take care of shipping out orders while we are gone. He is excited to have a responsible summer job. He will actually get to make 10% of all sales while we are gone. And trust me guys and gals, no teenager in the world would be making that much money doing any other equivalent job. An hour or two a day for 30 days and will have enough money to get himself a nice dirt bike.

On the downside however I will not be available to pick up the phone between June 20th to July 20th. There will be a voice message asking you to please get in touch with me by email. However, I do know not everyone is computer literate so I will be checking my voice messages a few times a week and will try to follow up with each one of you if you choose to leave me a voice message. But quite honestly, getting in touch with me through email will get you taken care of a lot faster than leaving me a voice message on my phone.

On a final note, while I’m away for a month, if you would like to get in touch with me about anything you can leave a voice message by calling 386 383 8992, or email me for a faster response. Ride safe Bikers! Take care. Erhan

I’ve been using a cell phone now for probably over 10 years. Over the years the prices of phones and plans got more and more affordable for just talking on the phone. Yet the phone companies have found very creative ways to charge me extra over the years.

When I first got to the United States I walked into a Bellsouth store and got a Nokia phone with a $40 a month service fee for 300 minutes a month. At first I thought I would never speak over 5 hours a month on the phone. Then after a few bills you realize each call whether it is a second long or not counts as a minute. So 10 calls a day was all that amounted to basically. And you better keep them under a minute! You find out when you are thinking you are going to get a $40 bill it some how amounts to $300 when they decide to charge you 35 cents a minute.

Text messaging was something extra. You got charged to send a text and to receive a text. I remember these adding a few hundred to my bill every now and then. And I did receive a few heart stopping bills with over a thousand dollars in text message charges.

Today, I have a phone that gives me free internet, talk all I want, and free texting. Costs me hundred bucks a month. It all starts with a $50 unlimited talk and $35 unlimited data plan. Add the tax and the hidden charges, you have a $100 minimum a month. And God help you if you so much as to step in to the Bahamas or Canada. My advise is to shut your phone off when you go to another country.

I did some math in my head the other day. I said to myself there are 200 million Americans that can use a cell phone if they had one. Perhaps say there are over 100 million cell phone subscribers today all paying an average of say $60 a month on phone service. What if instead of paying different companies an over priced $60 a month, everyone in America was charged $10 a month tax to own a mobile communication line provided to each and every taxpayer. A chip you could put in your phone, laptop computer, home entertainment system and have online access to do any kind of communication you like. I don’t know, isn’t $2 billion dollars a month not enough money to allow every American the right to communicate (that’s employing over 650,000 people at a $3000 monthly salary to make sure everyone is connected.) The technology infrastructure is available, but who from the government would step forward and give each and every American citizen a Blackberry like device they can use to vote on every single issue we wanted. Does the Government want to represent the people, or do they just want the votes once in a while. I don’t want to vote for him or her and not bother with the details. I want my government to hear the voice of the people by asking the people if they should pass such and such law. Is it not technologically possible to send a message to a phone asking to vote yes or no. I understand 10 years ago this was not possible, but today, it’s a different world out there.

I don’t mind being taxed $10 a month and getting rid of my $100 monthly phone plan from T-mobile.

As my customers will know I use USPS (United States Postal Services) to ship my biker patches. It is cheap and allows me to offer my customers free shipping on most my patches. (Soon enough I will be adjusting the price of some of my patches to include the shipping in them, so that what you see is what you pay, no surprises of increasing costs as you fill the checkout process).

I’ve purchased a Pitney Bowes Stamp Meter where I print postage for my shipments. Well if an order comes, I get a little beep on my blackberry. I walk over to my garage print the order, package it and then print a postage on it on my machine. And if it is before noon (that’s when the postman comes to pick the mail) I walk the shipments to my mail box on the same day. However, any order that comes in the afternoon is still processed the same day, packaged and ready for shipment. The only thing is, the mailman picks them up the following day.

Now there is a date printed on each stamp, so all the orders that came in on Friday afternoon were marked Friday’s date as I processed them on Friday. On Saturday morning instead of leaving my mail at our mailbox I asked my wife to take them down to the post office as there was a large urgent package that needed to go out. Well the employees at the post office looked over the mails told my wife this has yesterdays date on it, go back home, print it with todays date and bring it back. Really?

Yes really! What a lovely way to treat a customer. Oh no you are not a customer though, the guys at the post office are actually doing you a favor by taking your money and mailing your stuff. Or at least that’s what it feels like. What a way to retain customers. Especially business customers that spend thousands on mail each month.

So I’m supposed to bring the packages back home, reprint, which means repaying for the postage. Oh they won’t give you a refund. The meter company says those are lost causes. Well I’m here to change all that for everyone. This is the United States of America. No service means no pay. It is as simple as that. And they think, just because they are the United States Postal Service that law doesn’t apply to them. Yes consumer protection laws state clearly. If you do not provide the service or the products your customer are paying you for, then you must return that money. I will have a talk with the supervisor of the Port Orange Post Office down here in Florida. Why do you have to treat your customers as if you are doing them a favor. What kind of a business attitude is that? I certainly would be out of business if I treated my customers like this. And who do you think you guys are, if you don’t accept the mail than return me my money. Than with the refunded money I would tell her to reprint the postage with todays date. Why are you sending me all the way back home? Isn’t this the post office? I mean are your brains that numb? I will be getting my money back on this postage and I am hoping for an apology as well. I just know one thing, I’m not going to keep quiet and let them treat me and other customers with the attitude as if they are doing me a favor.

Keep it up USPS and you will never see any profit and will always be asking for more tax payers money to subsidize your money loosing operation.  I certainly hope somehow this message ends up on US Post Master’s desk so that he can start training his personnel so that they can begin to appreciate the business we send their way.

I am highly disappointed. Any business that forgets to appreciate its customers will eventually fail.