The Order

Once you have your quote, it’s easy enough to order your boards.  Just click on “RFQ Status & Place New Order”, and you’ll see all your quotes there.  Expand the details for the one you want to order and add it to your cart.  Then click the checkout button at the bottom and follow the directions.

For payment, they accept PayPal and credit cards.  I recommend the latter; they charge an extra fee for PayPal.  Enter your information, submit the order, and off you go.  Note that your bank may charge an “International Service Assessment” fee; for me, it was $1.44.

Once your order is placed, you can use their excellent order tracking system to keep an eye on the progress.  To get at it, click on “Order Status” in the Existing Orders menu, and then the “Check Status” link on the order in question.  This will give you a nice, easy to read progress bar that tells you what’s going on with your order.

Now all you have to do is wait…

The Boards

My order was submitted on Monday evening, June 4, and it was accepted by Gold Phoenix the following day.  It was quoted with a 5 day manufacturing + 3 day shipping lead time.  I received a shipping notification on Saturday, June 9.  The boards arrived on Tuesday, June 12.

For those keeping score, that’s just about exactly a week.  To me, that’s an excellent turnaround time, especially considering that they were made in China.

They arrived in a nice little FedEx bag (FedEx shipping is included in the price, by the way; there’s no additional charge).  Inside that was giant log of taped-over bubble wrap that I had to dig through to extract the boards.  The boards themselves were in 4 nice stacks atop a piece of cardboard, and the whole thing was shrink-wrapped to keep it all together.

At first glance, the boards appear to be of good quality – but how do they really stack up?