GIANT Tanks from B&Q for £50

[Justme]

I know a lot of retail shops the till staff have to make the short fall if it does not tally,

My problem is I work for myself so can see both sides of the fence.

Rich

Thats actually illegal practice & should not be in any employment contracts.

I work for myself & if I make a mistake I put it right. Even when it costs me.

[kristen]

I build eCommerce systems and I have some opinions on what can go wrong.

The prices on the central computer are updated - or the stock levels. Lets say a mistake is made.

In the normal course of events a customer pitches up at the sales counter and asks for one, or a clerk keys-in a mail-order,  and they find there are none in the warehouse "Sorry, thought we had some but there are none there"

Or it is mis-priced - dunno what happens in that case, either they sell them all at that price, or an employee notices and thinks it odd, the fault is found and rectified.

With Internet sales the stock level, or price error, is uploaded automagically to the web, customers discover that the price is a bargain, or whatever, post messages on the forums, and hundreds of people place orders - and get their cards debited and an automated confirmation.

The scale of the rebound is dramatically different to the "old ways of doing things".

I'm not saying it is right, ideally there would be no bugs in software etc ...

If comapnies are held to account every time the upshot will be that the system will change - customers will place their orders online and have no guarantee that they can have anything at the price that it is quoted.  Companies will have to cover themselves, they can't afford to lose 1/2 million each time someone makes a pricing or stock error. The consumer will miss out ...

... I think it would be better if the consumer could accept that an error had been made and, sadly, they had no entitlement.

That's not to say that Company X should be allow to keep on cocking up, or deliberately screwing their customers over, but B&Q is a big organisation; I don't know how many such cock-ups they have had, but at the size they are it is probably reasonable that they are "allowed" several monumental fouls up p.a. - so long as they are seen to be improving, closing stable doors, and not constantly repeating the mistakes or screwing the customers over.

[martin]

Not got a lot of sympathy - "entry level" carts like OSC, Zen Cart and Cubecart allow use of "stock level", if B&Q are daft enough not to use it, they really should suffer the consequences
The other point is that online sales are incredibly cheap in comparison to even running a "retail shed", so there's lots of extra profits being made in online sales, a little of which they should spend on "getting it right"

[kristen]

"I seem to recollect a certain company aiding and abetting a maker of roof-mounted chocolate teapots in loudly proclaiming that one of their superannuated washing-machine-motor based devices, in an urban area, would give 30% of your average electricity consumption"

I'm interested on your view on this Martin.

I take the view that T.P.T.B. @ B&Q must have thought they worked - i.e. whatever twit briefed them caused them to think that this was A Good Thing.

If the roof turbines HAD done what they said on the tin it would have been a giant leap for mankind.

With the benefit of hindsight I know that they could not have worked. I reckon you knew that at the time, and some other learned folk did too. But perhaps the B&Q bosses didn't, were poorly briefed, failed to ask sensible questions, whatever. They are deinfiely not skilled-in-the art of wind turines, so in the absneve of sharp questions would have believed what they were briefed on.  Perhaps the B&Q bosses were greedy too - perhaps for their bonuses, or because they wanted to be "First" with rooftop turbines, or were scared witless that they would be pipped-at-the-post by a competitor.

Either way, they haven't made money out of it (I imagine), they have egg-on-face and so on. Also, I expect a lot of customers have lost money obtaining planning permissions and then B&Q pulled out, cancelled the sale and didn't compensate them ... although I don't know that, maybe the customers, in the main, have been compensated.

In additioanl to the B&G Roof Turbine there are, surely, lots of other start-up companies trying to sell chocolate wind-turbine teapots?

[kristen]

""entry level" carts like OSC, Zen Cart and Cubecart allow use of "stock level""

I think "stock level" is very difficult in eCommerce.

In a shop you have it in stock, or you don't. If someone can pick it up and carry it to a till they can buy it.

If you run a mail-order business you should be able to reserve stock as telephone orders are placed.  Still a slight window of opportunity to try to process two orders for the last-one-in-stock at the same time.

If you have the tear-out paper order form at the back of the catalogue of course people will attempt to buy things that are out of stock.  They never moaned when told it was out of stock - in fact mostly the T&C's said "We will substitute a like-for-like replacement"

eCommerce is different.

You put one in your basket.  What now? Deny anyone else putting one in their basket? Can be you be sure the first person will actually checkout? How long do you allow them before you take it out of thei basket and put it back in stock? Its not as though you even know when they have left your virtual shop!

If you lock-stock in this way you open yourself to your competitors locking out all your stock with bogus baskets.

Or I let you put it in your basket, but then disallow you to buy it when you actually try to check out (if other people beat you to the till).  That's going to T you off too!

But even if I get that right, the web stock may not be 100% up to date with the order fulfilment system. It would be nice if it was ... but ...

When we first built eCommerce systems we checked each basket against physical stock. As the orders ramped up the limiting factor was stock-checking from the web back to the "mainframe". Then we had a major storm that took out all the comms and the phone lines were down for several days - the web site was totally unusable, customers were T-d off.  So (rightly or wrongly) companies come around to it being better to take orders, do your best NOT to sell something you haven't got, but ultimately to resolve any out of stock issues with the customer if they arise.

I don't see that as being the same as selling unlimited numbers of water tanks when you only have a dozen in stock ...

... at the worst the first N customers who checked out on the Web should have caused the web product to go out of stock, regardless of any stock level updates from Central Systems; from what I read here it was actually days before the insufficient-stock actually updated the web.

So their systems are most probably seriously inadequate.

But its all very new. The rush of the Dot Com era threw caution to the wind and threw systems together seemingly no longer needing the good working practices of Software Engineering. There is still fallout from that period

[martin]

I have several ideas as to HOW the debacle came about, but the fact is that several people, particularly Hugh Piggott and Paul Gipe, who between them have written many of the text books on wind power had loudly said they were a con, well before the marketing started. I knew the odds of them being wrong were minimal - they know the subject backwards, and you don't risk rubbishing something like that publicly if you think there's a snowball's chance in hell of being sued.
At the time they announced they were going to market the things, I wrote at great length to B&Q, suggesting that they heed the experts, and stay their hand at trying to market devices that were attempting to subvert all the laws of physics.......... All I can presume is that the "pr wallahs" of the teapot manufacturers held greater sway than leading experts in the field.
  If you have a look at Paul Gipe's excellent website, "joke" teapots keep popping up  -he does his best to debunk them, but unfortunately it is very easy for smoke and mirrors to be used to fool the mug punters, investors, and particularly agents of government keen to earn "green brownie points"
What amazes me is that I came across this almost "by chance" - the research I did was as a result of being asked to give a second opinion on "greening" a school in South London - one of the things the "other company" had advised were two roof-mounted turbines at vast cost........ It "felt wrong", so I looked to the experts, and found my hunch was right....... If someone is going to put their company reputation on the line, they could have followed exactly the same internet research that I did........
What I do find interesting was that a complaint was apparently made to Trading Standards about the claims, citing the Gipe/Piggott references....... the advertising was totally rewritten within days following what rumours suggest were "strong words" from TS........

[kristen]

Companies that fail to get apposite information up to management worry me. One would like to think that a company making a bad decision, which good spirited folk alerted them of their folly, would get managements' ear.

In which case Tony Blair would have been alerted to the fact that Iraq didn't have WMDs and/or that the war was a folly

[RichardKB]

I know a lot of retail shops the till staff have to make the short fall if it does not tally,

My problem is I work for myself so can see both sides of the fence.

Rich

Thats actually illegal practice & should not be in any employment contracts.

I work for myself & if I make a mistake I put it right. Even when it costs me.

Yes so do I if it is my mistake. But I do not like the people that try it on i.e. bring some thing back saying it failed again when it is not the one I repaired the first time.

I once had the misfortune to have a laptop in from a guy who brought it back for some reason or another which I can not recall, but during my tests I saw his word documents and his folder was full of complaint letters to different companies claiming this and that.

I also do not like people that get stroppy when they have been informed of something and then forget and then say "we won't come back here again".

To Martin B&Q are here to make a profit for either the owners and or the share holders and if they can not make 10% overall after all deductions then they might as well put the money in something else that will, and not have any asset, employer or customer agro.

Rich

[martin]

far be it for me to give succour to the purveyors of teapots, but they really are "perfect" for a scam - everyone wants them to work, they're "sexy", they're a badge that you're doing your bit for the environment - most of all, the "middle management" of government, local and national can use them for the gaining of "green brownie points" - architects and planners bask in the "green glow" of their self-righteousness having incorporated them into civic schemes - supermarkets "bling up" their dreadful retail sheds with the damn things to convince gullible locals that they're "green"....... innumerable government ministers funny-handshaked (shurely not ) their way into making sure they were "grantable", and the companies are now in receipt of hefty gobbets off OUR money "because they only need a little more research".....despite the fact that the real experts know they're a con that need to rewrite several laws of physics to work........AND on top of all that, when they're found not to work, they discredit the whole wind industry, and sensible, viable turbines, properly sited get the flak, and probably don't get planning consent............

[martin]

I've digressed a bit from the thread - surely in a large company like B&Q, it is not impossible to nominate someone on the team who oversees all online offers? - who's job it is to check stock levels before an offer is made - always, and a simple system implemented to ensure that it minimises any chance of overselling - for the reasons outlined, it's not foolproof, but if the Glastonbury Festival can manage to sell the right number of tickets each year, mostly on line, then perhaps lessons should be learnt........

[RichardKB]

I don't know about you Martin but all the companies I have ever worked for, the physical stock check never tallied with the computer stock levels.

Rich

[kristen]

I agree, that is the very least that they should have done after the first foul-up.

Kodak had a pricing error - camera was £0 or somesuch. Might have been a typo, or a half-import during a price update (Oh, how I wish it was better programming if you are allowed to import half your price update list - but the first time it happens it might have been some unforeseen circumstance)

But there are numerous stories of offers-gone-wrong.

I would like to think that customers come to us, in part, for our experience and some of the QA procedures we put forwards during pre-sales.

We don't (i.e. we absolutely do not) put sites live on Thursday / Friday.  We don't want to be giving up our weekends sorting out any issues, quite apart from which neither the client nor us is watching the site carefully over the weekend, and the likelihood is that more customers are shopping than during the week ...

so what happens in practice? The client absolutely insists that the site goes live at 5pm on Friday

We have a comprehensive QA plan. Amongst the tasks is a report of products that are incomplete - missing image, missing description, product not got a stock record / price record / not assigned to any categories ... that type of thing.

Client works through the report uploading images, writing descriptions, then they half way and say the site is ready to go live.  Why for Gods sake?

When they open a new store and the decorators have finished two walls do they say "Right, that'll do, off you go"?

Do they heck ...

[billi]

sounds like REM      "Its the End of the world as we know it, and i feel fine "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eyFiClAzq8


come on there was a hook involved from the start ,

But its not the end of the world

Billi

[daftlad]

When they open a new store and the decorators have finished two walls do they say "Right, that'll do, off you go"?

Do they heck ...

Trust me they do, they just finish it at night.
Look at the west coast main line, they said it was finished, apart from the snagging.
About a month after it was "finished" I was using it and they had to have speed limits because of the heat?
just a thought

[Mike McMillan]

As of yesterday, B&Q had still not credited my account for the SIX tanks that I ordered. I am writing to them demanding that they honour the sale.

Mike McMillan