In Stock, order out of stock

[Andeh13]

In all due honesty mate, its christmas & new years. You cant have honestly expected a reply this quickly? Common sense should tell you that.

i had my car broken into and my nice shiny CD player pulled out of it 2 nights ago and i cant get hold of my insurance company or the crime scene guys from the police. Ones off work till wednesday and the other is running on half staff and so are all backed up. Its just that merry time of the year where everything backs up & you just have to grin and bear it.

[Bazz]

Card purchased Friday 12noon, that was 4 odd hours to realise they had made a mistake.

Christmas?? they operate a 24/7 online shop, if they can't back it up with human support, why be in business??

My ISP seems to do really well, staff have been around all Christmas and New Year, BT are in, Sky are in, OMG even Dabs and Aria are in, but not Scan, oh no, too much like take money from people worry about it in the new year.

[Saracen]

Don't think any of you realise........................

I needed the card on the 31st, and they offered that delivery time.

It was in stock, so I ordered it, only to find out that it is on pre-order only, no email to me stating this, no email what so ever regarding the lack of delivery or stock.

I doubt they will offer a alternative at that cost, if they have any in stock that is, but also, slightly cheesed off if they give me a refund it could take up to 30 days, and also I have to go through the hassle of trying to source another.

For someone so good at quoting their legal rights, it seems surprising you didn't reads the terms and conditions. The delivery dates given are an estimate. If you needed delivery guaranteed by a specific date, you need to make that date explicitly clear, AND you need to make it "of the essence". In the absence of that, the supplier's standard T&Cs will apply, unless they contravene statutory provisions, in which case those statutory provisions apply. That, by the way, is standard contract law.

But the problem is .... if suppliers agree to a specific date, then they'll be in breach of contract if they fail to supply by that date, and could be liable for losses that result. So, you'll be VERY lucky to find a mail-order operation that will even consider supplying under those terms. Generally, speaking, it simply isn't worth the risk, and isn't part of their business model.

So I'm afraid that if a specific date is mandatory, you either need to make that part of the contract, or buy in person, where delivery problems aren't an issue.

I know it's extremely frustrating for something you were relying on to not arrive, but the problem here is that your expectations were unrealistic, in that you seem to think delivery by the estimated date was a guarantee. And to compound all that, as has been pointed out, it's Christmas.

Card purchased Friday 12noon, that was 4 odd hours to realise they had made a mistake.

Four whole hours? At the busiest time of the year? Wow.

Even major retailers will tell you that the Christmas period represents a VERY substantial portion of their entire annual turnover .... and that can be 50%. That figure is not an estimate or a guess. Yes, the few weeks leading up to Christmas and a couple of weeks after will likely see half the annual sales of major, national chains. And among the busiest time of all is usually the couple of days leading up to Christmas. Volumes can be absolutely berserk. Manic.

Christmas?? they operate a 24/7 online shop, if they can't back it up with human support, why be in business??

Backing it up with support doesn't necessarily mean every query gets answered. If sales volumes have increased hugely (and I bet they have), so will support volumes, so they'll be a queue, and very likely a skeleton staff.

My ISP seems to do really well, staff have been around all Christmas and New Year, BT are in, Sky are in, OMG even Dabs and Aria are in, but not Scan, oh no, too much like take money from people worry about it in the new year.

Well, I don't know how Scan compare in size to Aria or Dabs, but I'd venture a guess they're a tad smaller and with fewer staff than Sky or BT.

[russd1978]

Hopefully they will let us know tomorrow whats happening with these cards, I dont feel too aggrieved, just a little in the dark.

It will be nice to know where we stand and if the Palit cards will be sent out or delayed. Once I know whats happening I can then decide what to do. It is a busy time of year and I know Scan are smaller than a lot of other companies so it is understandable, but a cancel button would be very useful if they decide to update the e-commerce system on the site.

You do tick a box to accept the terms and conditons so personally I dont have a problem with the legal side of things, I just want to know what's happening!

[Saracen]

.....

I buy from Aria, Dabs, Ebuyer, eBay and other online retailers, and I have never had this sort of problem, shame for them, as my business will go elsewhere, others will no doubt follow, because there are a few posts here stating Scan have problems.

Yes, there are posts here about problems. But it speaks well of Scan that there are. It speaks well of them that comments can be made and aren't deleted on sight. There is certainly one other online retailer I'm aware of that doesn't permit such posts to be made, and if they are, then at the very least, posts will be deleted, and it's not unknown for accounts to be banned. I know that because I used to be a moderator on those forums and did some of the deleting and banning.

Yet Scan permit their dirty laundry, as it were, to be aired in public. Good for them.

The issue, in my opinion, is not that there are problems or complaints. It's the volume of complaints, in relation to satisfactory deals, and what they do about complaints when they do get them.

It would be very naive to think that any substantial retailer, online or not, doesn't have things go wrong, and doesn't get complaints. So there may be dozens of people that have had delivery disappointments, but how many didn't get disappointed? 10,000? 1 million?

Some people may shop elsewhere as a result of seeing those complaints, but others may also read a bit deeper than that, into how Scan deal with those complaints. And from what I've seen here, generally, they're VERY good at sorting out problems.


Bazz, you've had big disappointment, and clearly aren't happy. You've some grounds for being miffed. But try to consider the background. Realtime stock systems are virtually impossible to implement for automated sales systems, especially for a relatively small company. Scan certainly isn't Amazon. When you see a system that appears to be realtime, it'll often be illusory. The system sets a level, and as soon as stock drops below that level, it'll show as out of stock. But the simple logistics of stock control mean that very rarely will what the computer reckons is in stock be 100% accurate.

The problems are legion. For a start, there could be three, or thirty, or three hundred people all online to Scan placing an order for a given item, say a videocard, at a specific instant .... any of whom may be ordering multiple items. Suppose Scan have 250 in stock. Until that order is actually placed, the system will show the item as in stock. But if all 300 actually order, 50 are going to be disappointed. Even if the system switched to "out of stock" when stock reaches a minimal level, that situation may still occur if the number of people ordering at any given point exceeds that cut-off level. And, if you implement that sort if cut-off, even with a realtime system, it stands to lose orders because some people will go elsewhere even though the item was in stock - it's just that the cut-off made the stock system show it as out. So the price of such a system will be reduced sales volumes and lost orders. If you want to buy through mail-order, the inference is that price is likely to be a large part of the reason for doing so, so any business that operates on price has to do so by keeping overheads as low as possible, and that sort of increased stock-holding, especially in expensive, high-tech components, is VERY expensive to do.

As someone pointed out, Scan have been saying that this problem is being addressed, but it can take quite a long time to do if you're going to do it properly. It may well mean either finding or building new warehouse capacity because this type of problem comes from companies out-growing initial facilities. It certainly is likely to mean revising stock procedures, and probably security provisions, because inadequate security when operations hugely scale up is one reason why computer stock records rarely 100% match what's actually sitting on shelves. It probably means recruiting staff, and designing training regimes, and that's before we even start designing the stock control software ..... which, of course, has to interface to company accounting systems.

A company like Scan is going to be faced with a decision, depending on just how fast they've grown and by how much they're outstripping existing systems, to either try to cobble together upgrades, or to implement a totally new system. If the scale of the problem is large, then the latter option may be the only viable one and you have to be VERY careful to get that right, because if you don't, you risk putting yourself out of business entirely.

It does not surprise me that any major stock and systems overhaul will take a year or two, if it's a substantial overhaul and if it's being done carefully and properly.

In the meantime, there are going to be occasions when things don't work as customers like and, I'm sure, as Scan would like either. It's not much consolation when you're the one it went wrong for, but for you to call it a "scam" and start talking of criminal offences is way over the top.

At this point, I'd say you have two options :-

- use your distance selling reg's right of cancellation, and buy elsewhere.
- give Scan a chance to look into this, which I'd guess will happen pretty quickly once everyone gets past Christmas.

Bear in mind .... some of the people that would normally be sorting out this kind of problem may well have been away entirely for the Christmas period. I don't work for Scan, but I certainly went away just before Christmas and have only just returned.

[Andaho]

Distant selling regulations apply.
The item showed in stock, but obviously isn't, they have taken monies from me, which under the distant selling act, constitutes as a contract.
Selling items which aren't in stock (and showing them in stock) is actually against the law, and can be classed as deception, or obtaining monies through deception.

I believe you are correct here...

A website I placed an order with before christmas was forced to refund all their orders by their bank who froze their business account. A short page here gives full details (where they are trying to pass the blame on to their bank). It seems they broke distant selling regs, but scan certainly haven't and you are over exaggerating this problem.

I too, in the past, have ordered an item from scan to find a couple days later to still show as not picked, EVEN when it was still showing as in stock! So I rang up, and the operator told me on their system it was showing that the picker couldn't find the item in the warehouse, and after a minute on hold, I was told sorry, their stock level was showing incorrect and they actually don't have it in stock. - WOW what an honest answer from customer service! So, I asked for the order to be cancelled, then I went straight back on the website, and made a new order for alternative. My new order was delviered next day, and I was refunded my first order to my credit card within a week. A very smooth rectification of a problem.

I can understand your frustration but you are incorrect to think that scan have more problems than any other e-retailer. It is unlucky that you had problems when you required the item for a specific date, but ordering ANYTHING mail order even with "guaranteed next day delivery" doesn't actually mean that you will get it next day - I've had problems with parcelforce delivering a PF24 next day parcel 3 days later! - I was refunded 25% of the postage cost in accordance with the terms of their guarantee - What a crap guarantee!

Anyway, the lesson to learn here is, if you need something urgently, mail-ordering from anywhere isn't guaranteed delivery dates, even if they say it is... the guarantee will be something crap like I had, 25% of the delivery cost refunded!

[Chris P]

Bazz

I am sorry for the delay you have experienced and can understand your disappointment when the card did not arrive, we do send thousands of automated updates to inform our customer's of any delay's precisely to avoid disappointment such as this.

If you can PM me your invoice number I will look into this for you and see if our tracking system did in fact let us down in this case.

Regarding the Distance Selling Act I would like to point out that in this scenarios there could have been many instances causing the stock shortage and we have not committed an offence. The relevant authorities would only deem this to be deception if we had knowingly been selling a non-stock item, which we have not.. Just too name the main two possible reasons why this has happened

1) Stock Discrepancy
2) The item could have been sold in our Reception area

Of course I will know more once I have the invoice number

Best Regards

[Bazz]

PM Sent.

[russd1978]

Decided to cancel my order in the end and go for a Gigabyte version as ill have to wait anyway.






.

[Bazz]

Got 2 different replies from their support about delivery times.
Was offered a reasonable deal on the 256MB card, but did not accept, have decided to be refunded.

[Chris P]

Bazz

We have a confirmed order on the system due to be completed tomorrow 3rd January 2008

Regards

[Bazz]

Bazz

We have a confirmed order on the system due to be completed tomorrow 3rd January 2008

Regards

Thanks Chris I can confirm that I have received a confirmation email.