Before I start - I want to make it clear that I am a big fan of cypress products and have found this forum to be a very worthwhile resource. I am not making a complaint at all - but would just like to air my experiences with the contributor award programme.

A while back, in July, I was lucky enough to qualify for a contributor award from cypress. The first email I got asked me to choose from 1 of 3 rewards and to provide a shipping address for them to send it to.

The 2nd email revealed that actually I'd be given a voucher for a discount in the cypress store and that I'd need to pay the shipping costs. Still - that worked out at a good deal, a reasonable discount - even though I now had to spend $35 getting something that was nice to have, but I wasn't planning to buy anyway.

Then came the shocker - I got a bill from TNT for $53 (£35 GBP) for import duty! 

See, if the first email had said how the rewards programme worked and that it'd actually cost me $88 to get my reward I would have happily passed it onto someone else. 

I tried to email the contact at Cypress (Amanda Yuan) but her email address doesn't exist any more - I expect she has since moved on. I also tried to email Cypress Customer Care - but there email bounces back with a message saying that they are out of the office for the next 2 weeks!

If this had been my first contact with Cypress I wouldn't be very impressed - however I'm happy to say that I have dealt with support teams and technical people at cypress and always found them to be very extremenly helpful and professional - just this one sequence of events that seems a bit at odds with the normal Cypress experience.

As someone point out that it would be better if it can be arrange to get the reward via a local Cypress agent in different counties. But not sure if this can be arrange by Cypress and the distributors.

Yes, that was me making that suggestion. My feeling for a reward that I had to pay about $ 100 for... Well, it is cheaper than an ordered part but it costs a lot more than a reward should.

The problem with Amanda was that someone didn't follow up. Afaik did Amanda finished her job and left Cypress but her work was not done completely. With the help of Robert  Cypress managed to have my reward sent to me, or rather one of my rewards, the second wasn't even taken notice of...

I would realy whish someone could take a bit more care of us contributors...

Bob

 Yeah. Fortunatelly I found out on time that I would have to pay at least $100 on customs agent + taxes (because the only shipping option is fedex). In the end it would have been cheaper to add a kit on my next digikey order :P