Slagging off suppliers: above all that?

[vyv_cox]

It\'ll never work

One man's jokey interchange is another man's insult. It takes two to tango, and to fall out over a deal or some service. The cases we read here are almost invariably only one side of the argument. It often seems to me on reading the outpourings of "outraged of Solent" in these forums that it would be very revealing to hear the vendor/service provider's side of the story. In many cases I guess that there would be a very different slant on it.

Your point 3 sounds logical, but I suspect that few companies have the time, capability or enthusiasm for writing comment like this. If it came to the point that all companies needed to employ someone to answer such matters, guess who pays?

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[Twister_Ken]

Isn\'t the problem of the nub that...

...the majority of online chandlery complaints seem to be about out-of-stock?

Walk into a trad chandler, and if it doesn't have what you wanted on the shelf, you either buy the nearest equivalent, or ask when it will be in, or walk off, muttering under your breath.

Shopping online/by phone, you don't have that level of control. Your order a left handed 12" marline spike, 30 metres of 3/8th titanium chain, a box of wotsits, and a spinnaker pole extension. They say certainly sir, debit your plastic, supply the marlin splike and tell you the rest is on back order and they will deliver it as soon as it is in. Meanwhile, the season ticks past as the container bringing the wotsits from Taiwan is washed off the deck of the SS Elephantine in the Red Sea, the spinnaker pole extension maker goes belly up and titanium becomes impossible to get hold of because it proves to be a vital component of cruise missiles.

I think it would be very easy to judge a supplier not on price, or attitude, or inside leg measurement, but on whether they actually supplied what you ordered at the time they said it would be supplied in the initial contact.

Did they succeed - yes or no.

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[milltech]

Re: \'ang on a minute

Is there such a thing as an outrageous price in any free market?

When you're stuck on the M2 and the tow truck jockey wants £175 to get you to Canterbury that's outrageous. When you look on the Internet and see a product the price is surely either acceptable or unacceptable, (in which latter case you move on to another vendor).

<hr width=100% size=1>John
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.allgadgets.co.uk>http://www.allgadgets.co.uk</A>

 

[milltech]

Yeah, but we all drop one once in while whatever we do for a living. One swallow and all that. I think some volume of response would be required for validation of superior service. I, for example, forgot to include a speaker when packing a box yesterday.

<hr width=100% size=1>John
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.allgadgets.co.uk>http://www.allgadgets.co.uk</A>

 

[tcm]

Re: grading mailorder suppliers

This was done in the computer indutry by a major company/user of I T gear. Rather than have favourites, they decided to first rate all the suppliers from performance over a couple of months, and then award preferred supplier status to that company, and dump the losers. They decided to grade suppliers of IT gear according to

speed of response to enquiry,
speed of providing quote,
keen pricing,
range of goods offered,
helpfulness on the phone,
courteousness of the telephone salesperson,
their product knowledge,
delivery speed/
accuracy of items ordered v delivered
accuracy of paperwork on deliveries

Anyway, suffice to say that they all huffed and puffed to do their best, till one of them realised the the way to score highly and get all the business was to offer a massive massive range at unbelievable rock bottom prices and be very helpfuland knowledgeable indeed (not too hard with puter stuf really and they all are) but then, whenever anyone in the special customer company ordered something, just get *any item* off the shelf, plonk it in a box and make sure it gets there the next day with a Dnote quoting the correct order number, contact details and so on.

This supplier scored top marks in all categories - except zero in order accuracy - but therefore got all the business cos it was rated 90%!

Unfortunately, the same people now run on-line chandleries.


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[Gunfleet]

<<I, for example, forgot to include a speaker when packing a box yesterday. >>
Too much scuttlebutt, not enough work going on. You can't get the staff, you know.

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[milltech]

I need a Foreman

<hr width=100% size=1>John
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.allgadgets.co.uk>http://www.allgadgets.co.uk</A>