Haul: Testerkorea (January 2015)
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Hello! It's been a wee while since I posted on here (almost a month, sorry!), but today I have a review on a site called Testerkorea. It's another online Asian beauty store, but this is one that I didn't include on my previous 'Recommended Online Asian Beauty Stores' post. This is my first time ordering from Testerkorea so rather than review the items, I decided to focus more on the site itself. It's a bit photo heavy, so caution!
Disclaimer: All items were purchased by myself and I am not affiliated with the store. All my opinions are 100% honest regardless.
Like the previous stores I've reviewed, Testerkorea (referred to as TK from now on) is an online store that sells Asian beauty products. Most of the brands they stock are Korean, though they now stock some higher end Western brands like Dior and Clinique. They of course have the most well known brands such as Etude House and Holika Holika and some cult favourite brands like Hanyul and Sulwhasoo. They have a wide range of full-sized products as well as samples and members can even get 30% off certain categories, which is great. They do shipping by weight as well and I've found it's a lot cheaper than Roseroseshop's shipping.
This is the first time I've ordered from TK, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I actually hadn't heard about this website before, but I read on a couple blogs that it was similar to Roseroseshop (RRS), except with cheaper shipping. I won't say if it's 100% true as the prices for different things vary on both sites but I have found that most items I'm personally interested in are a lot cheaper. The shipping, which is one of the biggest gripes people have about RRS, is also a lot cheaper on TK in general. One of the downsides I have found is that the processing time on TK is generally a lot longer, though apparently that has only happened recently due to their many sales.
I actually placed my order before the membership changes, but now TK has a membership program which has ranks of Cute, Girl, Sexy, Princess, Queen and Business. You will get 30% most items from the 'Sample Sale' and 'Brand Sale' sections of the site up to the Queen rank. If you manage to spend over 1,000,000 won (about ~$1000 USD) and rise to Business rank, you'll get 35% off from those categories. The previous reward program was a bit different, where rising to a new rank granted you different rewards. Currently the ranks are a bit obselete unless you get to Business rank.
Anyway, I placed this order on the 28th of December during the New Year's sale that was going on. It did take quite a while for it to be processed and shipped out though, it was only shipped out on the 8th of January so the processing times was about 11 days. I picked the Air Mail shipping which was the cheapest and I was pretty surprised at how fast it arrived. It came on the 14th, which is only about 6 days (5 business days). This is super fast for Airmail and on par with the EMS shipping I got from RRS.
This is how the package came. There were packaging peanuts galore and, as you can see, a couple cute sample packages on the top. The shipping cost was about 15,810 won which is pretty reasonable for the amount of items.
Here are the samples that I got! It's a good amount considering that my order was about ~60,000 won. I just realised while editing this, but almost all of them were from Tonymoly! I'm not complaining though. The samples included were:
- Tonymoly Ferment Snail Cream x2
- Tonymoly I'm Real Lotion (Seaweed, Aloe)
- Tonymoly Intense Care Sleeping Pack
- Tonymoly Red Appletox Honey Cream
- Tonymoly Panda's Dream White Magic Cream
- Tonymoly Floria Active Peeling Gel
- Nature Republic California Aloe Sunblock
- Nature Republic Super Origin CC Cream
Here are all the items I got (listed in order appeared):
- The Face Shop Pore Tightening All-in-One Serum / 9,030 won ($11.30 NZD)
- It's Skin Have a Eggshell Cleansing Foam / 2,310 won ($2.90 NZD)
- E-Choice Soybean Cleansing Foam / 2,000 won ($2.50 NZD)
- Etude House Styling Eyeliner / 1,750 won ($2.20 NZD)
- Etude House Look at My Eyes in RD301 / 2,450 won ($3.10 NZD)
- Aritaum Honey Melting Tint in Bitter Rose / 5,600 won ($7.00 NZD)
- Popco My First Lipstick in Burgundy Rose / 7,900 won ($9.90 NZD)
- Etude House Play Therapy Pomegranate Firming Sleeping Pack / 6,400 won ($7.90 NZD)
- Too Cool for School Dinoplatz Escalator Mascara / 13,300 won ($16.60 NZD)
- The Face Shop Rice Ceramide Moisture Toner / 3,080 won ($3.90 NZD)
- Nature Republic Botanical Vanilla Green Makeup Base / 4,130 won ($5.20 NZD)
- Tonymoly Tony Nail Snow Fantasy in Snow Fantasy / 2,100 won ($2.60 NZD)
Not too many items, but definitely a sizeable haul for me. I think my favourite would have to be The Face Shop Rice Ceramide Moisture Toner. This is very cheap but it works well as a toner and doesn't dry me out. Also, can you see the packaging on the Too Cool for School Dinoplatz Mascara? It's so adorable!
Here is a run down on Testerkorea as a site!
Pros:
- Low pricesEven if you disregard the 30% discount that you get on some items, the prices are still pretty cheap and definitely reasonable. A lot of the prices are on par or even lower than Roseroseshop (here is my previous review on RRS).
- Useful membership programLinked to the point above, the membership program on TK is pretty useful. I've detailed it earlier in this post but basically you receive 30% on most items that are in the 'Brand Sale' or 'Sample Sale' category on the site. Granted, there are some popular brands that aren't included but a lot of them are: Etude House, Tonymoly, Hanyul, etc.
- Reasonable shipping pricesThe prices are a lot cheaper than other shipping-by-weight stores like RRS and stores that include the shipping in the price of the item too. I've seen some complaints but come on, how cheap do people expect international shipping to be? I think ~$16 for 1.2 kg is pretty reasonable.
- Safe shipping and handlingMost of the smaller items were wrapped up in bubblewrap, and there were packaging peanuts to fill the rest of the box up. Everything was packaged safely and there was no damage!
- Good variety of samplesIn the sample section on the site, they have a very good variety of samples from different brands, ranging from cheaper brands to those that are more high end. I remember reading a blog post where the author found out it was a lot cheaper to buy the packs of samples from TK and decant than to buy the full-sized product, so there you go. I'm currently doing some extra research into this and I might do a blog post about it later!
- Decent amount of samples (per order)I wasn't expecting to get a horde of samples with my order but I appreciated the amount that I did get, since my order wasn't too big, I've heard from some people that you usually get a lot of samples after you go up a rank on their membership program, but I'm not sure if that's still valid after the changes.
- Good customer serviceIn my experience, their customer service has been really friendly and quick to respond. I wrote to them to enquire about some things I wanted that were out of stock, and they wrote me back in about 3 hours telling me whether or not they would be getting more of the products I requested in.
Cons:
- Website is a bit hard to navigate (sometimes)I say sometimes because it can be easy to get lost in the many categories in the topbar at first. It's hard to know which categories a certain product would fall into, especially if you're not familiar with Asian beauty products.
- Slow processing timeI've mentioned this earlier but lately the processing time on orders from TK has been quite long. Many have speculated that they are still recovering from their year end sale or their sale of the Su:m37 Miracle Rose Cleaning Sticks,
- Lack of information in descriptionsThere are some items which have a lot of information but then some that have like one sentence about them and don't even show the shades that are available. I understand that I can easily search for it myself, but I think it would be more helpful and professional if they included the English info banners like some other sites, like Jolse, do.
Overall, I was really happy with my Testerkorea order. I've actually placed another order already (shows how slow I am at writing reviews haha), and I would recommend TK as a place to stock up on Korean beauty products. I do prefer getting larger hauls from TK since you have to pay shipping weight, but if you're not planning on buying too much you can always split shipping with a friend! The only major downside to me is how long it takes to process each order, meaning it can take up to 10 days (sometimes even more) for an order to be shipped out. The other stuff isn't too irritating, but I just wish they would improve the TAT and then I would rate TK even more highly.
1 comments
Oh your blog is so cute! I love the pixels and everything >O< Speaking of testerkorea, Ive heard lots of good things about it but I'm just wary about the high shipping price QAQ
ReplyDeleteJessie @ bijou-heart