New Mint website erases old discounts

Heading toward the U.S. Mint’s transition from one website to another Oct. 1 has created at least a couple of issues with customers.

I have had a number of inquiries regarding the cancellation of the subscription program and the accompanying 10 percent discount on the Mint’s products.

The writers of these inquiries are not happy to lose the discount.

I am told that in the data migration all Mint customers are essentially being equalized in their status to facility a clean transfer.

When the new website and order management system goes live online on Oct. 1, there will be a another method of subscribing to products called enrollment.

Anyone interested in signing up again will be able to do so.

What won’t come back, at least for the time being, is the 10 percent discount.

According to the Mint, the new system will be more flexible for promotions and offers.

The implication is that offers of some kind will be made but they can be much more varied than a simple 10 percent discount and they can be much more targeted.

Until collectors can put a few weeks or months of use under their belts, they won’t know if what they are to be getting in these promotions and offers will be as good or better than what they had to give up for the sake of the data transfer.

The new Mint website is the public face of a new order management system that also encompasses the telephone call center and the product distribution center.

The old system had limited capabilities and as such certain processes had to be done manually.

One of these manual processes was to review all orders to make sure they did not violate the household order limits on popular programs.

In the case of the gold Baseball Hall of Fame coins, the Mint says it has shipped 99.8 percent of the 50,000 that can be legally sold, but the manual order review process is being interrupted by the transition to the new website and order management system.

I think we can all agree that a new Mint website and order management system is a good thing, but collectors who have lost discounts will want the Mint to show them the money in other ways.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is winner of the 2014 Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."