The website update (downgrade) and its many shortcomings

As the title suggests, the new webpage has a number of shortcomings (to put it mildly...) that are absolutely essential in terms of functionality and customer satisfaction.

After the new update we are no longer able to select a warehouse that persists throughout the entire site. The previous iteration of the website allowed customers to select their warehouse, so that only results of that warehouse were shown. It was far from perfect, e.g. it often reset to international when you visited again a few hours later, but at least it worked. As it is now, the local item pages have simply disappeared, as have their comments and discussions. For example, a HobbyKing employee commented on the EU version of the Taranis page that new stock was on its way on October 18. This information is now nowhere to be found (and the Taranis is still not in stock in the EU warehouse, but that's a separate issue).

Related to this is the inability to add an item -in a specific warehouse- to your wishlist, so that you can get a notification when it is back in stock -in that warehouse-.

The search function is also very limited. It lacks warehouse selection, as mentioned previously. Additionally, it only has a few basic sort options and no filter options whatsoever. Filtering based on category is basic functionality and required for an efficient search.

I can't stress enough how important local warehouse functionality is. Without this option, HobbyKing is no longer attractive. Many customers (myself included) are not interested in ordering from the global warehouse, due to shipping costs, arrival time and least of all VAT due to importing expensive items from China.

My suggestion would be to -restore the old webpage- as soon as possible to prevent a lot of customers leaving HobbyKing. Use the new website as a starting point and fix the issues that so many people here mention. When it is ready, launch it as beta.hobbyking.com or something similar and ask for customer feedback. Only then migrate it to the main website. I do not believe the new website is pure crap, as it does fix several problems with the old website. Unfortunately it also lacks several features that are of crucial importance. I do not want to browse through pages and pages of irrelevant items (i.e. not in local warehouse). I do not want to refresh a product page several times a day to see if it is back in store for my local warehouse. If it was not for the substantial store credit on my account I would order elsewhere.

P.S. After much fiddling around I realized that clicking on the flag next to the title on an item page allows one to change the warehouse for that item (provided it is in stock), but this is far from intuitive, especially because nothing happens when clicking the flag if it is only in stock in the international warehouse. The flag is a good idea, but show them all next to a product, including those where it is out of stock (greyed out).

P.P.S. After the update (well, downgrade) the forums have become read-only. The register and login links are broken and result in a not found message (and it logs you out and resets preferences for language and currency... somehow).