Terry's Village

Full review
The Holiday 2003 Terry’s Village catalog introduced itself to my home with an appealing promotion: “Over 350 NEW Ideas for Gift Giving & Home Décor.” Equally enticing was the limited, “$1.95 Delivery!” offer on standard ground deliveries. Since we were in the market for fanciful, holiday ornaments at rock bottom prices, my wife decided to visit their online store.

The home page of TerrysVillage.com is a warm, inviting, and colorful site that offers a full range of gifts, décor, and trinkets and is reminiscent of the whimsy and bargain prices you might find at an old fashioned general store. The site is easily navigated and is logically displayed utilizing various themes, including: Americana, Country Farm, Autumn & Winter, Family & Friends, Faith & Inspiration, Lodge, Spring & Summer. More Themes include: Cats & Dogs, Nautical, Southwest, and Victorian. Click on the tab for the “Sidewalk Sale” and you can currently shop for over 150 items at bargain prices.

Although my wife had the catalog handy, and could easily order by simply entering the item numbers of her desired products, she decided to browse just for the fun of it. As usually happens when she browses, she discovered a few more inexpensive ornaments that “we just had to have!”

A search for ornaments yielded 17 pages (9 items per page) of ornaments of various sizes, materials, themes, and pieces. All of the available items were quite inexpensive and the selection process was more a decision about design rather than price. After about an hour of listening to her squeal with delight at how cute the baubles will look on our tree, she finally narrowed it down to the following choices:

FELT ELF SNOWMAN ORNAMENTS (3PC) for $4.99
FELT SANTA SNOWMAN ORNAMENTS (3 PC) for $5.99
RESIN GINGERBREAD MEN ORNAMENTS (6PC) for $7.95
RESIN HOLIDAY WISH ORNAMENTS (6 PC) for $2.99

I was certain that the price on the last ornament set had to be a mistake. Three bucks for a 6-piece ornament set? Happily, there was no error. Once we placed the items in the shopping bag and entered our $1.95 shipping promotional code, we determined that what you see is truly what you get at terrysvillage.com. Our order total was under $24 (including shipping), and we received a total of 18 pieces.

We were lucky enough to have a promotional discount to apply to our online order. However, be advised that regular shipping prices are not the lowest you’ll find on the web. For standard shipping, it will cost $6.95 for orders totaling $25.00 or less. From there, the breakdown is: Orders of $25.01 - $50.00, add 7.95 shipping. Orders of $50.01 - $75.00, add $10.95 shipping. Orders of $75.01 - $100.00, add $12.95 shipping…and so on. The highest category—for orders $200 or more—results in a 10% shipping cost. Ouch! My suggestion would be to keep on the lookout for shipping discount promotions. In our case, we could have ordered $200 worth of merchandise from Terry’s Village, and only spent $1.95 shipping with the coupon keycode from the back of the catalog. You really can’t beat that.

Once the order was placed and confirmed, we waited for our shipment to arrive to check out the quality of the items. You do have the ability on the website to check the status of your order online, which we did. On the home page, there is a link to “Track Orders” on the left hand side of the page. After inputting your order number and zip code, you are taken to a details page that provides the contents of your order, number of boxes shipped, date shipped, carrier, tracking number, and more. Although my wife could access the order tracking feature, for some reason the “Log-in” feature was problematic. Attempted log-ins resulted in error messages, so she requested her password to be reset. She made it as far as actually changing (resetting) her password, but when she tried to use the new password, she received the same frustrating error message. It’s not clear how much of a problem this is for other customers, but we hope that the bugs can soon be worked out with this feature.

The shipment arrived a bit sooner than expected, and all fragile items were carefully packed and protected. My wife inspected all of the ornaments, and found them to be as “cute” as they were represented on the web page. The pieces were of standard dimensions and craftsmanship.

Interestingly, my wife remarked that the Felt Snowmen ornaments looked very similar to a product she had seen recently at Oriental Trading Company (www.orientaltrading.com), the party and novelties superstore. Sure enough, terrysvillage.com displays a link for the Better Business Bureau Reliability Seal. The BBB seal actually names Oriental Trading Co., Inc., as the program member. In addition, we found that the websites are quite similar in design and feel. I don’t know what the business relationship is between the two companies, but it’s a safe bet that if you are happy with the items and prices at OTC, it’s a good chance you’ll be pleased with the products from Terry’s Village as well. We certainly were.