Website Payments Back to Normal

We are pleased to report that our Payment Gateway SagePay is now working correctly, and we are able to take payments with credit or debit cards as normal.

We would like to apologies to our customers who attempted to place orders with us last night and were unable to do so.

We will continue to monitor the situation throughout today and hopefully we will have no further problems.

Website Unable to Process Payment

We are very sorry to report that since around 19:30 this evening we have been unable to process credit and debit card payments. Our Payment Gateway - SagePay - have experienced a system wide failure that has meant we have been unable to take payment for orders by card.

We would like to apologies unreservedly to all of our customers for the inconvenience caused.

We will continue to update this blog post when we have further news.

Telephone and Live Chat Support

We pride ourselves on always being available for our customers and on the many methods we make available to contact us. For this reason we carry out maintenance on our Telephone, Live Chat and other communication systems to ensure that for the remainder of the time they work as required.

In line with this standard we will be carrying out maintenance beginning on Monday 24th August 2009 and ending on Monday 31st August 2009. During this time we will be unable to offer Telephone or Live Chat support, or take any orders over the phone. We are afraid that any voice mails that are left will not be dealt with until Tuesday 1st September 2009.

We are very sorry for this interruption to our Telephone and Live Chat service but we will still be able to offer email service during this time. Simply email shop@pure-beauty.co.uk if you require any assistance.

Please note that during this time our website will be working normally accepting, processing and dispatching orders as usual. There will be no interruption to this service.

Website Maintenance

Due to the problems we experienced last month with our website being slow and access to the secure site being, if not slow, then impossible, we have arranged some maintenance to our site to try to prevent the same problems occurring again.

The maintenance will take place on Thursday 20/08/2009 between 08:00 and 09:00 hours. We are not expecting any problems during this time but our site maybe unavailable for a short time.

If there are any changes to the plan or if we experience any difficulties we will post updates on this blog.

20/08/2009: 08:50 Update:
The maintenance is now complete and our systems are back to normal. We appreciate your patience in this matter.

Website Unable to Process Orders

We are very sorry to report that our website has been experiencing sever problems since around 12:00 today. There have been many problems with the website being very slow indeed. This problem was resolved around 16:00 today but then another issue occurred with our secure server. Without this working properly we have been unable to correctly process orders although we would like to thanks those customers who did persevere and managed to place their orders. We processed these as normal and sent them on time with Royal Mail.

We hope to have the situation resolved very soon and we would like to apologise to all of our customers unreservedly.

21:00: Our website is now backup and running properly and orders are being processed as normal. We will monitor the situation for the next few hours.

Pure Beauty Online's Environmental Policy

Many of our customers have requested further information regarding our policy toward the environment. We have always been very concious about our approach to minimising our businesses impact on the environment and we published our beliefs and strategies from the beginning on our About Us page. We thought it maybe beneficial if we explained a little further on our blog.

Dermalogica Products
The Dermalogica products that you buy from us arrive in plastic containers and many in cardboard boxes. All of this product packaging is fully recyclable today and should be disposed of with your household recycling as normal.

Packaging and Filler
All of your products are sent in white cardboard boxes which are fully recyclable and the void filler we use to protect your items is a biodegradable filler made from starch. Polystyrene is not biodegradable and cannot be recycled. We do not use plastic bags to send your products.

Some customers have expressed a concern over the size of some of the boxes we use when ordering a small item such as an Eye Cream or Concentrated Booster. There are two reasons for this. Firstly we like to ensure that your products reach you in the best condition possible. Secondly we include within each parcel the Dermalogica Product Directory, your Dermalogica Samples and the delivery note. We can completely understand our customers concerns but everything we use is recyclable and we hope you would agree with our reasoning.

Delivery
Probably the largest impact our business has on the environment is due to the logistics of delivering your products to you. We took a decision early to use Royal Mail. This was due to the fact that Royal Mail already have the complete infrastructure in place. They have vehicles on the road moving post around the country and therefore adding to it can only reduce the card foot print of that journey. We decided that a courier means implementing a dedicated journey by a vehicle to deliver the parcel and that this was not as environmentally friendly.

If you require any further information regarding our Environmental Policy please do not hesitate to contact us.

Pure Beauty on Shopping.com

As part of our commitment to make our website and service open to public scrutiny, we have joined Shopping.com which allows you to complete a survey and provide us with feedback as soon as you have placed your order. You can also choose to receive a follow up survey via email 5 days after your order to allow further feedback after you order has been processed.

When you have completed your order you will be invited to take a survey in a popup window. If you do not wish to take part then simply close the window. If you wish to take part all you need do is follow the instructions on the screen.

How We're Communicating with You

We have updated our website over the weekend to better enable our customers to communicate with us. There are many ways that you can talk to us:

By Phone
You can always call us on 0121 314 7039. We understand that a lot of the time we are busy processing your orders, and we may not be able to take your call personally, but it is always possible to leave voice mail message. We promise you that we always call our customers back - always. Even when a customer has subsequently emailed us and their query has been resolved we have still called them back.

By Email
One of the quickest way is to email us a shop@pure-beauty.co.uk. We will answer as soon as possible and maybe call you on the phone if we feel that a chat would be better. That's why it is always important you register a telephone number with us.

By Chat
We implemented a Live Chat service over 12 months ago which will enable you to get the answer to your question immediately. If we are not online at the time then simply send us an email with the form provided.

On Facebook
We started a Facebook page earlier last month to enable our customers to see what we're up to and to join discussions with us and provide us with very public feedback. So if you're on Facebook why not add us to your list.

On Twitter
We have just started tweeting Shop Messages so you can follow us there too.

Our Blog
You can always comment on this blog on the articles we post. We would welcome any suggestions you would like to make about future posts and the type of subjects you would like us to cover.

We know how hard it can be sometimes getting hold of real people when dealing with websites. We are trying to break the mould and blaze a trail for all websites encouraging frequent and speedy communication with our customers. Let's hope more and more websites follow our lead.

Website Unavailable

We would like to apologise to our customers for any problems they experienced today trying to connect to or access our website from about 2 p.m. until around 4 p.m.

The company that host our website decided to upgrade a piece of their hardware at 2 o'clock in the afternoon without warning us. There was meant to be no disruption but, clearly when you upgrade a major piece of hardware such as a firewall, then inevitably there are going to be problems. This is the second time an incident similar to this has happened this year and we will therefore be seeking alternative hosting in the very near future.

We are genuinely sorry for the disruption to our service and for any inconvenience caused.