Strong Demand for Euro Coins

Euro Coins Index

Viewing Figures to November 2001

Viewing Figures to January 2002

Swamped by Demand for Euro Coins

An Apology
We apologise to any of our customers who have experienced any problems or delays in receiving their orders for Euro coin sets. We will try to give here a brief insight into some of the causes.

Staggering Success Causes Delays
We started our first page about Euro coins in October 2000, and started to invite advance orders for Euro coin sets in June 2001, adding new pages and information as it became available. We noticed strong interest in Euros from our web-server statistics, which tell us the number of viewings of each page, right from the start, and it had grown by December 2001. We had already started to receive some advance orders by then, although we were surprised at how few early advance orders we received in view of the amount of interest in our pages.

Surprised by Sudden Demand
What caught us our completely unawares was the huge leap in interest from January 1st 2002. Our web statistics show we were using about 5 gibabytes of bandwidth (traffic volume) per month in November 2001. Part way into February we got a warning that our bandwidth forecast for the month was 16.5 gigabytes. This posed a problem, as our server contract is for 10 gigabytes per month, with penalty rates for excesses. We had to spend some time uploading images to one of our other sites, and doing some other re-design work.
We show 2 graphs of our site usage, the first in November 2001, the second, in March 2002, shows the spike in January stating in January before we applied the re-design.
As you can imagine, we experience a peak demand in December, usually followed by a quiet start in January, which allows us to recover from the rush. This year however, instead of slowing down in January, sales and enquiries started at thre times our pre' Christmas peak level. We have been working 12 hours per day to keep up with the demand, and not quite been able to keep up.

Order Priority
Ours is not the kind of business where we would be happy to employ temporary staff, so we have had to work hard to try to optimise our resources and our service during this first part of 2002. We have concentrated on getting simple orders posted out within 24 hours wherever possible. Anything slightly complicated has had to wait until we had time to deal with it, and we have been working hard to ship out all the advance orders as quickly as possible, although there has been a slight complication with some of these as we will explain.

What Date?
We must admit we shot ourselves in the foot slightly, because when we added the Euro sets to our site, particularly our own packaged ones, we advertised them as being 2002 dated coins, as we believed that all countries would be issuing 2002 coins, even if some also produced earier dates ones, from 1999. What we should have done is to advertise them without specifying a date. It is not easy to get uncirculated coins on demand for any of the countries, but to specify particular dates is almost imnpossible. It is also entirely possible that some countries will not produce every denomination bearing every date. If we were being cynical, we might suspect that this was done deliberately to enhance the sales of the mints' own packaged sets at higher prices.
We have been trying to contact customers with advance orders to explain this, and to ask if they would prefer to receive mixed date sets soon or wait for all single date sets. This has taken longer then we would wish also. If you are still waiting for a delivery and have not yet heard from us, please contact us to let us know your choice.

Enquiries
We have been receiving a complete flood of enquiries, many of them asking questions which are already answered on our site. If we had diverted our time to answering these enquiries, we would have had no time to process any orders whatsoever. Instead we tried to answer frequently asked questions on our site. If you have e-mailed us, and had no reply, we hope you will understand and accept the reasons.

Viewing Graphs
The two charts show our web site overall viewing figures from 1998. Note that the spike on the second chart has caused the axis dimensions to to re-adjusted making the previous part of the chart look flatter than previously. You will probably agree that the earlier graph shows an impressive increase. Despite being around since before 1964, our sales have doubled every year for the past 3 years, largely because of the 2,500 pages on our 5 websites. The trend looks set to continue this year. We are currently in process of recruiting at least two new staff members.

More about the EuroZone

1992 England Pattern ECU's

World Coins & Sets - Who Issued What?

Euro Coins Index