Don't treat flash, animated website programs as an indication of professionalism. We are far too busy with our ongoing repeat custom to faff around with the latest IT gizmos, but, paradoxically, someone with only a handful of customers has all the time necessary to present an image to Cyberspace which looks like a multi-national corporation! Our on-line presence is one facet of our well-established mail-order operation. Unlike many of the newly spawned on-line businesses we don't just exist in cyberspace and therefore our experience is both 'pick and shovel ' as well as ecommerce
Here's a 10 question check-list showing how you can discern whether you are buying from a bona-fide business or whether your are ordering from someone who has no stock, no experience, no responsibilities, no premises, is not registered for VAT, launders your credit card through a third party, is not qualified to deduct taxes and deal with customs and who, basically, maybe just in it for the quick hit or may actually be a crook. The ecommerce revolution has provided loopholes for amateurs to disguise themselves as professionals when they are not. Buying occult goods on the net is NOT like buying other stuff and for your own safety and well-being you need to realise who is who and what is what
. We never advertise goods unless we have stock right here on our shelves. We stock thousands of books and products, we hold stockof some titles in hundreds of copies to cope with expected demand. Don't buy on cyberspace promises - buy what's actually there!
Unlike most on-line occult booksellers, we do not simply compile lists from publishers handouts and catalogues and present a mammoth selection. We know that 50% of publishers' lists are either out-of -print, have risen in price, may not be legally available in your country of residence due to copyright restrictions, or might not even have been printed yet.
In the old days there were specialist occult book publishers.Their management had an interest in the occult and ensured that they only published TRUSTWORTHY titles. Since the explosion inthe New Age there has been a phenomenal amount of misleading rubbish published by non-specialist publishers whose main interest is the bottom-dollar. We only advertise books that we have SELECTED as being both available AND pertinent. That means we cut out the 50% of sensational rubbish which rehashes, debases or misleads. Our list is SELECTED to be of great use to your occult development, not simply to sell you the maximum amount of books.
We DO NOT work through Amazon Books because we are established book-sellers in our own right and hold our own stock. MANY other on-linebooksellers pretend to be specialists but are simply a staging post for big-business. You give them a cut of your money when you click on their Amazon link. Most of these 'book-sellers' will never see any of the books they are selling you!
In short are they simply traders or are they producers? Approximately 90% of all occult supply businesses rely on 10% of the wholesalers to provide them with'magical' goods. Hence though their goods may sound unique, often they are all offering exactly the same thing because its simply a case of buying and selling. There's more going on than high-street buy-and-sell at the Sorcerer's Apprentice because we DO NOT sell our goods to any other supplier and we DO NOT wholesale our goods to any other company. Our products are unique -we make them here on the premises on a limited scale in time honoured fashion ensuring that you get the best possible quality and most genuine occult items that can be relied upon. We DO NOTrepackage stuff for other people. We DO NOT buy our products in from anyone else. Our products are UNIQUE and you will benefit from that in your magic
Judge for yourself. Since ordinary traders who are not initiated enough to produce genuine items themselves got onto the occult bandwagon, ' wholesalers' have sprung up to provide products made down to a market price. Hence you will find similar sounding magical oils etc., at 'discount' prices everywhere. To check whether these 'discounts' are genuine why not do a bit of basic calculation? One of the essential constituents of every genuine formula for Sun Magical Oil is Liquid Gold. You will see from our price list that this is currently 13.00 pounds sterling for 5cc. - Hence you can see why, with a 1.00 post and packing cost, plus a 75p bottle and 17.5% VAT; plus a host of special ingredients including Gold Chloride, the genuine Sun Oil from the S.A. is good value at 14.97 for 10cc. What do you get, do you think, in the ones offered by other shops for 2.99? Impossible isn't it? How can you tell whether the website business makes its own concoctions and products? Simple, like us, they will sell the ingredients to you separately. If they have no raw ingredients lists how can they make up their own goods?
Does the website include a full postal address and 24hr telephone number? Who do you complain to about non-delivery, damage, incorrectly sent titles, mis-addressing and all the other problems which can ensue with amateurs when several different organisations are dealing with your order, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing? Who takes responsibility in law for the deal? Who charges your credit card? Where do your name and address details go and can they be trusted? In Britain all businesses which handle personal data by computer come within the Data Protection Act and have to be registered. It is illegal for a company to transfer your personal data unless you give your permission. All bona-fide businesses (like the S.A.) are licensed to handle computer data. Our methods in ensuring your confidentiality go far beyond the requirements of the Data Protection Act but many on-line businesses are not registered and are accepting and passing on data illegally. Of course if the Data Protection Registrar cannot identify them or write to them then you can't stop them. Once you have given your details to such people it can become virtual public property. Fancy the uproar for example, if you ordered from one of these unregistered sites using a computer at work and they sold the email address to another occult supplier who then emailed you with occult information for everyone in the office to see? In contrast we do not involve anyone else in the transaction. We actually have the books and products here on our shelves. We physically pick up your order, handle it respectfully, and with the care synonymous with committed book lovers who are also occultists and who realise the importance of your choice to your destiny. We process your order entirely in house, we pack it off to you direct so your confidentialities are kept secure and you can come right back to source in the rare event of anything going wrong. We DO NOT grab your money and then pass your order on to some anonymous global shipment house to deal with and we do not sell your details to anyone else nor do we send unsolicited emails. That is a 25 year promise!
Not all on line traders are kitchen-table amateurs and people have to startup somewhere, however any genuine business will have its own unique web address. Amateurs often use free space on someone else's server to avoid ongoing charges. Some use free-space because of its anonymity - so they can do a bunk and not get caught. The difference in addressing is easy to spot because the free space address will involve sub-domains and be non-specific.Something like conmanonfreespace.atacomputercompany.com ,(the actual owner of this site is www.atacomputercompany.com and conmanonfreespace is the free sub-domain). A regular business website address will simply involve the business name, something like www.thiscompany.com or a country specific suffix , e.g. www.thiscompany.co.uk. Bona-fide businesses with proper addresses are registered and full details of their site, registration, name and address can be obtained on-line at www.internic.com so there is comeback. Amateurs with free space are completely anonymous. Strictly speaking Servers with free sub-domains do not allow people to have free space if they trade but keeping track of it all is difficult for them and most rely on surfers' complaints to keep the flee-by-nights away - hence you may find that the site you have sent an order to disappears overnight after someone else has complained about poor service, or is axed by the Server when a change of policy ends their free space offer. What do you do then? The entire transaction, even if fraudulent, cannot be traced unless the owners of the server cooperate. In our experience of copyright fraud on the net (where someone was selling stolen material - making users of it as accessories after the fact) the server company (a large organisation) would only assist when a writ was issued to force them to; so buying on line is fraught with difficulties. Using an established and known company which has spent years proving its honesty and integrity is a valuable advantage. We have that advantage.
An occult quest will involve much more than simply buying a book. Information Technology and Ecommerce makes big claims but actually narrows the choice for many people because ebusinesses cannot economically handle real people and real things; they have to 'cherry pick'. As bank-users have found to their cost, giving ones' finances to an on-line bank is low-priced until you come to actually having to withdraw cash or pay in cash. That obviously cannot be done on-line so those high-street banks which have to pay far more than the electronic banks do to maintain branches have implemented massive charges to cover their costs. So the great free online banking revolution is an illusion EVERYONE HAS TO PAY EXTRA in real life because internet banks 'cherry-pick' in cyberspace. The on-line banks want people to be forced to have their salary paid into banks; they want people who have mortgages, and other outgoings on direct-debit; they want people to use plastic cards to pay for anything they need in shops and they want the big supermarkets to act as banks and hand out cash so that the internet banks can sack thousands, save millions on staff wages and keep one fat-cat and a supercomputer running 24 hours to transfer billions whilst they take a 3% cut off the top daily on the money market. They do NOT want people asking for cash, or to see the bank-manager. So it is with occult supply, on-line businesses want to sell you 'average' sized books which fit 'average' sized padded mailing bags, with card covers to keep down the 'average' weights. They will sell you 'averagely' priced books in a bracket which hits the 'average spend' and guarantees an 'average' profit for them. They by and large do not sell small priced items, bigger than usual books, cheap things or posters and obtuse objects which are difficult to pack. They do not want to supply heavy items which exceed their carrier's limits; they do not want to supply items which cannot be prepacked, or made up on demand. They rarely cater for special orders or items made to measure (things which can be crucial in your occult quest). All these things, like herbs for example, are low profit, time consuming items with a high proportion of effort required in purveying them. To us they are part of the responsibility of occult supply because they are ESSENTIAL things to your magical quest. But to many others they are just problems which get in the way of making a fast buck. Do these type of items appear in the other on-line suppliers' lists? If not why not? Are they just'cherry-picking'? Anyone will take a cut and direct you to Amazon, because its easy. But how many also stock the psychic Equipment which back up the books and without which your magical experiments come to a halt? Very Few. Plenty will direct you to fine-sounding 'spellbooks' but how many will stock the ingredients to make the spells in that book work? Even fewer. And what does this mean in total? That when your magic is crippled before you start there is no point in telephoning or emailing the person from whom you bought that book, because, 'they only deal in books' - and you are on your own.
(10) Do they provide you with itemised receipts
When you buy from the S.A. you get a complete itemised breakdown of what you have spent and how much everything has cost - right down to the last penny. You always know what's what and where your money went. No 'unspecified disbursements' here! Our order processing system is unique - the program was written specially for us to make everything transparent to you. Click here to see an example of one of our receipts.
(11) Are they adepts in business AND Magick?
Magick is a powerful force. No one can investigate or experiment with it without changing their lives in some way. Practically all changes are positive and add to the well-being and knowledge and understanding of the operant, but sometimes, when untrustworthy information has mislead a seeker, problems can occur. This is the make-or break point with your on-line supplier. DO THEY BACK UP THEIR GOODS WITH INITIATED HELP? You will only ever get to know how good they are when you are in most need of their help and advice and most just don't give a damn. Of course, there are other self-styled occultists on the net who might offer you advice but can they be trusted to understand the sequence of events and are they initiated enough to give a solution? There is one SURE way of moving forward. To be able to ask the person who selected and sold you the information, equipment and consumables. That person, if he or she is responsible and stands by his/her oath, will know everything there is to know about the stuff they are selling, because that kind of person would not sell you anything without being able to handle all eventualities. They are in the best possible position to assist and advise. For loyal customers at the S.A. that invaluable service come FREE as part of the package. It is neither possible nor desirable to remove every uncertainty in life but there is no point in putting your head on the block simply through the wrong choice of on-line supplier.
" One thing I love you people for, is your swiftness to rospond to your clients as it has been in my case. You are very encauraging. Thanks for the acknowlegement of my order. Now I don't want you to forget me, I am sticking to the S.A and I will need your constant contact, my dear patient friends. I spend no less than 5hrs on your net per week! Thanks, Mr K.W. Monrovia, Liberia. "