E-Tailers and Stock Levels.....no not scan

[ikonia]

E-Tailers are starting to go down the pan from my experiences of late they seem to have lost focus on the customer's needs.

I ordered a few minor things on Monday from Kustom PC's who have always been fantastic for me in terms of service and quality and I've never had a problem with paying the few pound extra on their prices due to this quality. The items I ordered where all in stock, super. Today I recieved a package opened it up and was dissapointed to find out that 3 x 1 item that I ordered was not in the package, and a note was on the invoice with a circle around the item saying "to follow". This is beyond cheek no information, just send out the item and put "to follow" on the invoice, no explination, no pre-sending of the package email, no eta no anything which I can only assume was to stop me canceling the rest of my order and going else where.


People are all too aware of scan current high perception in order failure so I won't drag that on.


To be fair its not just e-tailers. I found a pair of shoes that matched what I was looking for on the ted backer website (don't normally shop there, I promise) they looked fine but I wanted to try them on and make sure they looked as I expected as websites can be a bit missleading with images. I rang my local store to be told they don't have them, and that I should order them of the internet and return them with in 14 days. This is a bit of a gamble for me as to if I'd be able to turn this around in 14 days due to work commitments at present. I asked if they could get a store to ship them to my local branch so I could try them on they said they do not do stock tranfers and that I have to drive to my nearest shop that had them in stock (85 miles each way) or mail order them from that shop, which I would have longer than 14 days to return, however if I did return them I couldn't get a refund, just a gift voucher, so if the shoes turn up and don't look like the picture on the website or just don't fit right I can only get a voucher, these shoes where £200 ???? no thanks.

People seem to have forgot about the customer is paying for this stuff, yes there a problems but keep them informed and try to make it easy for the customer to spend their money. The items I've tried to buy of late have just been one cock up after the next. We need bit of reccsion to make shops appreciate business and not wait for the next moron to over spend on their credit card.

[Stoo]

Looks like the JIT method is falling down for some companies, when it works, it's great, but when it fails, boy does it fail spectacularly..

[just_laze]

Scandalous!

laze.

[neonplanet40]

kustom pc done this to me also about a year ago. I ordered a full watercooling kit with everything in stock. they sent me everything but the tubes (to follow).... i had to wait a week for them and i obviously couldnt install it without them. i never ordered from them again.

Neon

[menthel]

Slightly shocked at Kustom tbh, they are usually great. Mind you they are rather small in compared to scan, so perhaps sometimes they suffer because of this.

[ikonia]

agreed, normally great. But size doesn't stop them sending an email to say - sorry item out of stock do you still want to continue with the order, which I would have done as they where only minor odds ands sods.

[Funkstar]

We come across the "more to follow" issue a lot at work, but then that is when dealing with regular suppliers and they are old school non-etail operations.

I'm surprised at KustomPCs, but Menthel could be right.

Whatever the reason though, in this day and age it still sucks.

[Tom Scott]

Slightly shocked at Kustom tbh, they are usually great. Mind you they are rather small in compared to scan, so perhaps sometimes they suffer because of this.

The smaller the company the more organised and efficient it should be. I always find the bigger boys are much less efficient than smaller companies.
Not everyone though, some bigger companies do have good systems in place... Scan being one of them

[Agent]

What does my head in is company's inability to have a real-time stock control system.
Its really not hard. Most people at A-level do a small scale project similar to it in computing.

When I say real-time, I mean it. Someone add's a product to their basket and its reserved for them until they either purchase it, or a set amount of time, say 15mins. The NEC website does this when buying tickets for concerts, and that handles thousands and thousands of ticket orders per day.

How retailers cant design such a basic system amazes me. You have X amount in stock, then you do X -n, where 'n' is the number of items that are sold. When X = 0, its out of stock.

Its also easy to check if all items are in stock when they are paid for using this method. If they have gone out of stock while they have been looking through the site (assume that it wasn't using the system like the NEC I mentioned above) then they should be informed then, not the next day. The option then to change the item should be offered, so they can go and change it.

There is also no reason IMO why retailers should charge a card before dispatch of items, which some seem to be doing. There is a function for checking if funds are available, without taking the money directly - Its called 'pre-auth' in the industry commonly, or pre-authorisation, for its proper name.

Is it just me, or are a lot of retailers going downhill at the moment?
I have about 5 that I commonly order from, and the last year has been the worst i've experienced when it comes to them getting things right.

[ikonia]

my list of about 15 trusted shops has gone down to 2 at the moment.

[finlay666]

What does my head in is company's inability to have a real-time stock control system.
Its really not hard. Most people at A-level do a small scale project similar to it in computing.

When I say real-time, I mean it. Someone add's a product to their basket and its reserved for them until they either purchase it, or a set amount of time, say 15mins. The NEC website does this when buying tickets for concerts, and that handles thousands and thousands of ticket orders per day.

I have had that exact problem on my last 4 orders through Scan

I have to say when I asked on another forum about why they couldnt do it:

Reserving stock from the point of the order being taken would cause chaos and basically why should we waste time picking an order by either actually serialising the product to the order or setting it aside.

This would waste a massive amount of time, in turn causing massive delays. If the item was allocated this would need to be restocked when the product was simply removed from a basket.

Think about the thousands of people that would do this, its not feasible and would be a logistical nightmare.

Sorry but the system we have has been thought about to extent and a much simpler and effective option.

I beg to differ, if an item is reserved for 15 minutes and it WOULD sell out in that time, I am sure someone would buy it after the 15 minutes were up and the item was added again, such as G0 Q6600's and the laptop from my latest fulfilled order which was on today only twice since it came back into stock AND was on the mixit page (which is not exactly of satisfactory quality to put it simply...touchpad/buttons do not work and MS COA is worn down)
(link to post/thread can be provided on request, don't want to advertise other forums after my sig incident lol)

As for retailers now, I am more inclined to pay a slightly higher premium and get it through work/my old workplace and wait a while for it. in terms of pc cooling I will continue to use one as I can get in direct contact with the owner easily and he has gone out of his way for me (and a few others I know) to get parts in like specialist barbs at no extra cost

[Funkstar]

Also being able to amend or cancel your order online once complete is surprisingly lacking in most places. Dabs have been doing this for years! So have Amazon.

[finlay666]

Scan too, you have to call them/raise a note as opposed to a quick personal edit before it is picked

[Agent]

I have to say when I asked on another forum about why they couldnt do it:

Those comments are quite worrying to be honest. Whoever has made it doesn't understand how a stock management system works. Its just non-sense.

Reserving stock from the point of the order being taken would cause chaos and basically why should we waste time picking an order by either actually serialising the product to the order or setting it aside.

No picking needs to be done what-so-ever. An automated system keeps track of how many products have been sold, regardless of if they are on the shelf or not.
When the picking of items happen, it would be no different to the way an order is placed at the moment.

This would waste a massive amount of time, in turn causing massive delays. If the item was allocated this would need to be restocked when the product was simply removed from a basket.

It would save a huge amount of time for both the company and the customer, and not 'waste' any at all. It would cut down on the admin needed to deal with out of stock orders.
Im not sure what the 're-stocking' is going on about either. An item would only be reserved in the computers memory until the full order went through.

Sorry but the system we have has been thought about to extent and a much simpler and effective option.

Its quite clearly not more effective than a fully automated system due to occurances of out of stock items. An effective system wouldn't allow that, at all.
Its 'simpler', sure. But thats not always a good thing for the customer.

I've no idea who made those comments, but they just come across as silly, especially when it was presumably posted on a computer based technical board.

[finlay666]

Agent,

it was from a Scan-to-XXXXXX site, which has a vendor forum, I made the initial enquiry after having a laptop for my sister be delayed by a day, my one day off work for that week (mon-sat) so had to take my time to collect it the following week, which was a large inconvenience to say the least

I know about the EPOS systems, even at a rudimentary level I had done an in depth case study on a local De Vere (Slaley Hall) hotel to see how they allocate rooms etc on their booking system, it's the same idea at the low level theory in terms of allocation

And the person that made the comment was a manager....pm-ing link to the original thread