Whenever my family goes overseas on holiday and checks into a hotel, one person that we will speak to is the concierge. The word concierge is derived from the French term Comte Des Cierges, which means "the keeper of the candles", who tended to visiting nobles in castles of the medieval era.
In current vernacular, the concierge is a person located at the frontdesk of the lobby of a hotel who attends to the needs of guests, such as running errands for them, advising them on transport arrangements and places of interests to visit, etc.
Several weeks ago, I was blogging about Melodious Scripture, ie how each Hebrew alphabet represents a certain musical note, and how people have translated Psalm 23 into its musical equivalent.
Well, as a result of a YouTube video contained in that blog entry, a dear sister provided me with a link called MusicFromGod, where other passages of scripture such as Psalm 48 and Psalm 81 can also be heard in musical form.
I went to visit their online store, and found 4 items worth purchasing. However, upon checking out, I discovered to my disappointment that the site only accepts US-issued credit cards.I thought that would be the end of that, but God has provided the solution. Read on...
Recently, my daughter had also been asking me to get her a plush toy of a character featured on the PlayhouseDisney called Pocoyo. I did a Google search and discovered that only shopping sites in the UK carry it. (I surprised her with the toy a couple of days ago, but that will be the content of another post...)
I went to check out VPost's website (which is a service provided by SingPost, which I had used to order the goalposts for my son's birthday party, of which I blogged about here), hoping that they had would have some arrangement for the UK. Alas, they only have vPostUSA and vPostJapan, probably due to insufficient demand for online shopping from UK sites.
Anyway, while checking out vPost's website, I came across something called vConcierge.This is a value-added service from vPost, which allows a person to order items from US merchants that do not accept Singapore-issued credit cards!
This is essentially how it works...
1. You provide vConcierge with the website address and details of what you want to order.
2. vConcierge will check out the site and send an email with the amount that needs to be paid.
3. Upon paying vConcierge, it will then place the order on your behalf.
There is of course a fee that vConcierge needs to earn by providing this value-added service, but this was effectively the solution to my earlier problem.
I thus gave the above MusicFromGod shopping list to vConcierge to buy the 4 items on my behalf. The value-added service fee came up to about S$33.77, which is pretty reasonable, given the circumstances.
The rest of the process is taken care of by vPost, ie. the items will be shipped to their USA address, and then shipped back to Singapore on a consolidated basis together with other items ordered by fellow shoppers dwelling in Singapore.
Thank God for this virtual "keeper of the candles" :-)
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