How important is product availability to you?

[Mark_Skyland]

This is a bit of a difficult question to ask and probably more difficult to answer as I suppose it comes down to what you need and how desperate you are for a product, so here goes nothing.

 

Over the last couple of years we have tried to be 100% accurate on the stock levels shown on our web site (www.skylandequipment.com) OK, its never 100% mainly due to human error on our part but its not far off. This is great for customer service as you place an order and you have it within a day or two, good for us as we dont have to deal with back orders and its cheaper for us as we dont have to suck up the transaction fees and admin time if we do need to refund order due to a customer getting annoyed with waiting. The downside is that we do loose sales because you cant, ATM, order an out of stock item from our web site so you will probably go elsewhere. So my question and the question of the poll is how often in general do you want an item to be in stock for quick delivery? We can change the web site so that you could pre order items but it wouldn't give an ETA which TBH is pointless as for the past 3 years ETA's from most manufactures is hit and miss to say the least. 

 

Any feedback would be very much appreciated.

 

 

 

 

[Steve Bullman]

In general if I’m shopping online and the item is out of stock then I’ll go straight to look elsewhere. The only exception to this would be if it were a unique item not available elsewhere. 

[waterbuoy]

Ditto - I would rather pay more and get it when I need it than wait forever to save a few quid. 

 

Time is money and, in my case, there is not much of either left!

[GWYNFIL]

normally if it says out of stock i move on!  what does my head in  is says in stock click  pay then get email out of stock said in stock at time of payment . emailed  due 6/ 10  weeks . mean while price has gone up everywhere else ? R & T £1100. husky 592. feel a bit better now! lol

[GWYNFIL]

1 minute ago, GWYNFIL said:

normally if it says out of stock i move on!  what does my head in  is says in stock click  pay then get email out of stock said in stock at time of payment . emailed  due 6/ 10  weeks . mean while price has gone up everywhere else ? R & T £1100. husky 592. feel a bit better now! lol

what price u got on 592xp  mark pm me! asuming in stock lol

[Steven P]

Depends if your system can give a date of when it is expected to be in stock. 'This week' is usually OK with me, 'Unknown' and I'll look somewhere else. Of course good customer relations would suggest to keep this accurate

[Dan Maynard]

As above, I wouldn't order stuff not in stock and I'd pretty soon stop using a site where I regularly ordered stuff to find unexpectedly that it wasn't going to turn up when due.

 

I think you're doing it right, show live stock levels the best you can.

[Mark Bolam]

I don’t care really.

It’s all about the free sweets.

[Stubby]

19 minutes ago, Mark Bolam said:

I don’t care really.

It’s all about the free sweets.

This all day long !

[spudulike]

Here is my view....I use an online supplier for 98% of my machine parts ......sorry Mark, been with them for years and never had a bad experience but have purchased Echo/Some Husqvarna parts from your outfit and never had issues. 

 

My main supplier.....If the part is out of stock, I order anyway as they offer good prices, reasonable carriage, I know they will chase the part through until it is delivered (phone calls if they are having issues) and I know they purchase parts direct from the manufacturer so if they can't get the part in, no one else will. Typically when they first supplied Husqvarna parts, most were out of stock but after purchasing a few parts, I could depend on the parts being around 2-3 days more than their typical 1-2 days delivery if not in stock....not at all unreasonable.

 

The long and short, if you have confidence in your supplier, you have confidence to purchase out of stock items and that they will be delivered in a reasonable time. I guess if you can get the part from others at the same price or thereabouts, I may go to others but I like to do a single large order with all I need on it and that way it is job done.

The last bit is the ease of order - purchasing by Manufacturer > Machine Type > Model number and straight off an exploded parts diagram makes life nice and easy.

I would say most parts...... 75-85% that I have generally ordered have been in stock rather than all of them being out of stock and the out of stock are the rest.