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What 20,000 orders means

By on May 5, 2017 in RevereWareParts.com, Small business

We reached a milestone yesterday, order number 20,000.

Since we started selling Revere Ware replacement parts, our business has shifted more and more to Amazon.com.  While we still sell a fair amount through our own website, about 2/3 of our business now comes from selling our projects on Amazon.com.

In all, through both channels (and a brief stint selling on eBay), we’ve fulfilled about 40,000 orders since we started selling back in 2009.  This may not sound like a lot relative to the e-commerce success stories you can read about in the news almost any day.  But for us, we like to think about having made 40,000 people able to continue to use their often decades old cookware, and that makes us happy.  After all, we started this business because we were looking for Revere Ware replacement parts and couldn’t find them.

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Cleaning the inside of your Revere Ware tea kettle

By on April 27, 2017 in Care, Tips

Customer Carol asks:

I have been using a Paul Revere tea kettle every day for over 25 years. Is it still safe to use or does the inside corrode?
The Revere Ware tea kettles are made from stainless steel and copper.
Stainless steel is stainless because the chromium that is added to the steel oxidizes to form a protective layer that prevents the iron in the steel from rusting.  This is a self repairing coating; if you scratch stainless steel, the new chromium that is exposed will quickly oxidize to repair the protective layer.
Note that the chromium used is not the same as the type popularized by the movie Erin Brockvich.  The type of chromium in stainless steel is the same as is typically include in a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement, which supports healthy metabolism.
The copper inside a copper bottom tea kettle will naturally oxidize from exposure to oxygen, which will turn the metal a turquoise blue.  Additionally, hard water deposits will build up on the bottom and sides of a kettle from normal use.  Both of these phenomena are totally safe.
Copper is a naturally occurring metal and is an essential element for all living things, and hard water deposits are just minerals in drinking water, which also can be beneficial to the body.
To keep your kettle in good working order, it is important to clean the inside occasionally.
To clean a kettle, just fill it with vinegar (such as white vinegar) heat it, and pour it out.  You can do this repeatedly to get all the hard water out.  The vinegar will be very blue when it comes out, from the copper oxidation.  Some agitation with a bottle brush can help speed up the process.
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Expect good customer service

By on April 23, 2017 in Amazon, RevereWareParts.com, Small business, Tips

Just a reminder to our customers or potential customers that we do our best to provide good customer service.

If a product arrives damaged, we will replace it.

If a shipment fails to arrive, we will ask that you work with the Postal Service to locate it, and it that doesn’t work, we will replace it.

If a part fails and you weren’t abusing it, we will replace it.

If you are having an issue installing or using one of our parts, we will do our best to help you, and if that doesn’t work, we will take it back for a refund.

If you have a question, even one that isn’t related to one of our parts or won’t result in a sale, we will do our best to answer it.  However, we do shy away from giving marital advice.

The only thing we ask is that you give us a chance to solve your problem before giving up (and leaving us negative feedback), and that you are kind in your communications.

I wish more people who purchase products online would expect good customer service (and hold businesses accountable when they don’t provide it).  If everyone did that, businesses that didn’t provide good customer service would not survive.

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Mystery “B” stamp on lids

By on April 16, 2017 in History

Customer Rachelle contacted us with a question about the meaning of a B stamp in the middle underside of a couple of her lids.

These are lids that otherwise look exactly like the standard lids for the typical copper bottom cookware.

Does anyone know what the “B” stamp means?

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Amazon feedback – don’t believe what you read

By on April 5, 2017 in Amazon, Ebay

We’ve ranted before about the effect of negative feedback.  In the last few days we’ve seen some perfect examples of undeserved negative feedback affecting our Amazon seller rating substantially.

Here is an example of someone giving us the feedback that should have been left for another purchase.

In this next example, the customer was confused and thought 1 was the best possible feedback.  Thankfully, they retracted the feedback when we brought this to their attention.

These two reviews dropped us from 100% positive feedback for the last 30 days to 87%.

Unlike eBay, in which feedback is very frequently mutual, Amazon customers have very little motivation to leave positive feedback when they have a good experience.  That means that negative feedback has an oversized effect.  When see the feedback rating of an Amazon merchant, it will look something like this:

 

With the eBay feedback system, I expect that about the same percentage of happy customers leave positive feedback as unhappy ones leave negative feedback.  So, if I see a 92% feedback rating, I assume that there are a heck of a lot of unhappy customers and I tend to avoid sellers with ratings like that.  Even a 98% rating can indicate a history of issues with buyers.

But with Amazon.com, probably 10 or 100 times fewer satisfied customers will leave feedback than unhappy ones.  Let’s make some assumptions and see what a real feedback score would be like if everyone left a review reflecting their experience.  For example, let’s assume that 1/2 of all customers with a bad experience leave a negative review.  We had 14 neutral or negative reviews in the last year, out of 3768 purchases.

That assumption gives is 28 bad experiences out of almost 4,000 customers, or a real feedback rating of 99.26% (compared to our 92% rating as shown above).  Put another way, you would have a one in 135 chance of having a bad experience.

But that’s not the end of the story.  Almost no-one that leaves us negative feedback contacted us first to see if we could resolve their issue.  We are very helpful (if we do say so ourselves) and are always willing to solve a problem that is our fault, and usually solve issues that aren’t our fault as well.

That means, with us, you have almost no chance of having a bad experience.  I’ll bet a lot of other Amazon merchants are also very willing to work with their customers and have similar frustrations with the Amazon feedback system.

That reminds me, I am way behind on leaving feedback on my eBay purchases.  I’d better get to it.

Update 3/27/18

I couldn’t help but add a couple of recent feedback ratings we got on Amazon.com.

That last one just kills me.  It makes you wonder, exactly what does it take to get 5 stars in this day and age?

Arrived promptly, was as described, was well packaged, was hand delivered by the seller, at no cost, very satisfied.

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When you can’t find a replacement part – buy a donor

By on March 31, 2017 in DIY, Ebay, Parts, Tips

We often get queries for replacement parts not in our catalog.  Unfortunately, it isn’t economical for us to supply every type of part regardless of the amount of demand out there for it.  One option, is to search eBay for new old stock replacement parts.

When that doesn’t work, it isn’t necessarily the end.  Given that there is a very rich marketplace on eBay for Revere Ware cookware, you can very likely find the same piece you are looking for a part for, that is complete, and use it as a donor for the parts you need.

One example of a part that is critical and can no longer be purchased anywhere is the over pressure plug for the vintage pressure cooker.

While this may look like a simple screw, it is not.  IT has a hole in the center filled with solder that will blow out at high pressure.  Once the over pressure plug has been blown out, it must be replaced.

eBay typically has quite a few listings for the vintage pressure cooker.  For example, here is one for $30 shipped.

If you are attached to your vintage piece (as many of us are) this probably isn’t too much to pay to get your pressure cooker functional again, and you’ll get some other extra parts to boot.

So, the next time you can’t find a replacement part, consider buying a used piece as a parts donor.

 

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Revere Ware care

By on March 29, 2017 in Care, Tips

If you’ve got some serious crud on your Revere Ware, see our cleaning guide for some good tips on how to clean them up.

Here is what we used for ongoing maintenance of our Revere Ware.

First, never put your Revere Ware with Bakelite handles in the dishwasher or oven.  The oven can damage Bakelite; even though Bakelite is considered safe up to 350 degrees F, modern ovens can reach higher temperatures in places even when they are set for this maximum temperature.  We’ve heard many complaints to this effect.  Oven use will invalidate our generous replacement policy on manufacturing defects.

Dishwasher use can dull Bakelite over time (see our dishwasher test) and is not recommended.

We often use Scotch Brite pads to clean the inside of the cookware only.  While it will dull stainless steel, the inside of cookware becomes naturally dulled because of metal utensils, so this won’t matter.  Scotch Brite pads do a good job of removing cooked on items, and hard water buildup for pots that are used to boil water.

Don’t use these pads on the outside of your cookware, which you want to remain polished. 

For the copper bottom, we use Wright’s Copper Cream.  It is the closest we’ve found to the original copper paste offered by Revere Ware, and is more readily available.

There are many other natural methods of polishing copper (like baking soda, lemon juice, or ketchup) but we get faster and better results with the copper cream.

For polishing the stainless steel on the outside of the cookware, we use Bar Keepers Friend.  While it won’t necessarily make your cookware look like new, it will add a little shine.

We also like to occasionally use Bar Keepers Friend on the inside.  It won’t make the dulled interior polished again, but, it does seem to smooth the stainless steel out a bit and make food stick less.

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Consumer tip: Big Daddy sponges

By on March 24, 2017 in Tips

A few years ago I discovered the Scrub Daddy sponges.  They are nicely abrasive without scratching the polished stainless steel on the outside of my Revere Ware pans.

The problem is, they are expensive at almost $4 per sponge, and they start falling apart after a couple of weeks of use.  That’s $100 of sponges a year, or about a Spotify subscription.

I recently discovered that the company makes another type of sponge out of the same material – the Big Daddy sponge, which is a giant block.  Now, I slice that block into four pieces, which end up just a tad smaller than the Scrub Daddy smiley face sponges; this brings the cost down to about a buck a sponge.

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Revere Ware 3 quart tea kettle triggers, and other hard-to-find replacement parts

By on March 19, 2017 in Ebay, Parts, Tips

We get a lot of request for parts that we don’t carry – unfortunately, parts for some less popular pieces just don’t have enough volume to justify a production run complete with customer part molds.

One of the most of-requested parts is the trigger for the 3-quart Revere Ware tea kettle.  We’ve talked about 3D-printing them, but unfortunately materials aren’t quite to the point yet where they can handle the high temperatures that cookware require.

For the determined and dilligent, let me introduce you to a new concept – new old stock, which is often shortened in product listings to NOS.  New old stock stands for an item that is no longer in production, but someone found a cache of them somewhere that are still brand new.

For the tea kettle example, here is a small cache of the  (get them while you can, they will go quick), at an incredibly reasonable price.

Over the years, we’ve seen just about every part we’ve needed eventually show up on eBay, and this is how we got most of the samples we’ve used for our production runs.  Here is another part people often ask us about, the percolator and coffee pot handle.

If you are looking for a replacement part, search for it on eBay.  If you don’t find it, try saving the search via the follow this search link in the top of the search results, so that when new matches occur, you’ll get an email.

The search above, for “Revere Ware NOS” is a good place to start if you are looking for replacement parts that we don’t carry.

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