Buying from protoparts?

I was blessed enough to find protoparts and this forum after many many grueling hours of googling. The prices on the protoparts page made me smile gleefully. I wanted to order something close to 200 sheets of cards, since i will be printing and scrapping TONS of cards (testing my card properties with real game testing). But i ran into some problems when i tried to purchase the cards (and blank dice, which i was very happy about aswell).

3 things came up which scared me (because i entered my CC number already at this point)

1) When asking for my CC, it didnt ask what kind of card it was, or a verification code. All of which is standard online these days.
2) As much as I feel as if I was 'getting lucky', it didnt carge me anything for shipping, which it really should.
and the bombshell
3) An error came up for me when i tried to confirm my order, stating that the site was NOT a member of Authorize.net.

At this point i thought i just had my credit card number stolen. But finding this forum did help put that to some rest. However, I am curious as to what is going on with Protoparts? Is this store still functioning or no longer? Or did i just hit a fluke?

Thanks for your help.

Thanks for the heads up. Let me clarify a few things.

1) Not sure why the CC thing is coming up. Protoparts DOES NOT accept payment via CCs. Only Paypal and Money Orders.

2) You are charged actual shipping. The owner of the store looks at your order, actually puts it in the shipping container, weighs it, and plugs in into the USPS site along with your zip code to get actual shipping costs. Protoparts does not charge a one size fits all shipping rate like most e-commerce stores. You pay exactly what it costs to ship your items. After your order is placed, the owner will reply with the total cost of the items (based upon quantity pricing) and the shipping.

3) Again, Protoparts does not take CCs, which is why authorize.net says the site is not a member. I'm not sure what happened to the store, but something got reset, probably due to an undocumented server software upgrade by our ISP. As soon as the holiday is over I will look into it.

In the meantime, you can e-mail the owner of the store with what you'd like and he can handle the order directly. His e-mail is protoparts AT hotmail DOT com .

Hope this helps.
-Darke

I've made a couple of purchases from Protoparts so far. The occasional technical glitch arises, but Tom has been very responsive to my e-mails, and I haven't had any serious problems.

Got my order no problem all the way up to Canada.

RookieDesign.

What should I do?

E-mail the owner.

protoparts AT hotmail DOT com .

-Darke

LordBlue:

No worries. When I made my purchases this summer there was a couple weeks time in between me placing the order and it being billed/shipped. But in the end everything arrived as promised.