The capture idea is a reasonable one but that makes more work for us on our end. Right now we tell the card vendor to process at 11:30 pm daily. And on the weekends we miss the opportunity to catch these items.
There are no other vendors for this product line. As to adapting... IM trying a find a way to do that... It seems they just decided to cut back on products. I have some understanding of why as the manufacturer has QA problems with the kit contents, and they only supply the product if it justifies a product run. Example. It seems obvious that the distributor has a 20 kit minimum but maybe the Mfr has a 100 kit run minimum. Meaning that 5 distributors may need to order 20 kits before they will make a product run. I don't know but this seems to be the pattern. I don't have a problem with discontinued parts, back orders, etc. I just need to know what can and can not be supplied. Data file. Is there an easy way for them to provide this? It sounds as though this may be realistic. I understand that you may not advocate data scraping. I can appreciate that too. But at this time... I want results. If no one gets hurt then to me it is ethical, moral, and legal unless I hear otherwise. However if you disagree that's fine. If you find reasons to justify why this is either illegal, immoral, or inethical then start a new topic in reguards to a reply to that and I will watch all of you banter back and forth about it. I wont reply to that as it is at this time not my interest. My interest is in getting this data to synchronize on some level. Dave: Your idea of the capture though is a keeper. I will try to find a way to integrate that into our business model. Robert P. Reil Managing Director, Motorcyclecarbs.com, Inc. 4292 Country Garden Walk NW Kennesaw, Ga. 30152 Office 770-974-8851 Fax 770-974-8852 www.motorcyclecarbs.com -----Original Message----- From: Dave Bellevue [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 2:28 PM To: discussion@acfug.org Subject: RE: [ACFUG Discuss] Vendor Data Problem (funny) If their inventory policies changed, then it is up to you to adapt. If they didn't tell you, then you need to ask. I would expect they didn't change it only because they needed something to do, but rather did some analysis to determine what inventory moves the quickest. If it was forced upon them by the manufacturer, then again, you have to just adapt. Moving forward, you are going to need a way to get updates for discontinued products, specification changes, part number changes, etc. As to collecting at order fulfillment, I meant that you charge your customers' cards when you know what you can ship, charging only for what you ship - only capture the card information at the time of sale and process later. Hold onto the card info for when the backorders are able to be fulfilled. If the customer cancels, you cancel your order. You might need to investigate your agreement with your credit card processors (MasterCard/Visa/Amex/Novus). Because you state something on your web site doesn't mean it supercedes your agreement with them. As to minimums, I was referring to your vendor's statement "If a non stock item we can order in if Keyster will manufacture - minimum 20 kit order - 3 moths lead time". To me that clearly states a minumum. If possible, you might consider finding alternative vendors for similar products. I have never been an advocate of screen scraping. My suggestion was that your vendor provides you a data file (text, xml, MS Access, whatever) on a daily basis for you to use to update your inventory. They may be doing this for larger customers now. Thanks, Dave Bellevue -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Reil Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 1:22 PM To: discussion@acfug.org Subject: RE: [ACFUG Discuss] Vendor Data Problem (funny) I can understand your perspective. However one fact that may or may not be relevant. They are the North American Distributor for this Japanese Manufactured product line. As to thought out etc. They changed their inventory policy and product line without telling anyone. It used to work perfect. Now it hardly works at all. I can take blame where blame is due. But Im just trying to make things work. The problem is that when they run out of stock it takes 90 days to restock. I have no way of knowing what will or wont be available till I order it. Collect money after order fulfillment? Our business model will not allow it. There are about 3 million products we support. The industry does NOT expect us to inventory all this. We have a niche market and the policy of our store is payment up front, then we order it, then we ship it. Our legal link on the bottom of any page states our policies. If an order is cancelled, then restock fees and our expences are covered. That's just how it has to be. If not I may as well turn off the servers and get a job. We NEVER have a problem with customer satisfaction in this area. Go to any cycle dealership and ask for a part. Standard reply is "pay up, we will call you in 2 weeks when the part arrives". So this is nothing new to customers. Our agreement is that we are a Dealer account for their wholesale product verbally. That's it, that's all. There are no min orders. The problem with representing the product but not taking payment is one in which we are using AbleCommerce and I cant seem to find a way to manage this variable. So I am trying to do this within the framework of the tools we have. As to altering our business process I am all for that... I don't care who's right or wrong etc. I just need a solution. The question is... HOW? That's the whole reason for this thread as I am HUMBLING my self enough to realize I DON'T know it all and I may have overlooked an easier way. As to HOW. I will reply to Charlies email shortly for better understanding. Thank Dave for your perspective. Robert P. Reil Managing Director, Motorcyclecarbs.com, Inc. 4292 Country Garden Walk NW Kennesaw, Ga. 30152 Office 770-974-8851 Fax 770-974-8852 www.motorcyclecarbs.com -----Original Message----- From: Dave Bellevue [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 12:40 PM To: discussion@acfug.org Subject: RE: [ACFUG Discuss] Vendor Data Problem (funny) Well, I don't post here much, but have to speak up.... >From what I read, this should all have been thought out and documented BEFORE you posted a site. You're dealing with a common vendor problem. On one hand, you want to sell the vendor's product but you're depending on the vendor to bear the cost of stocking the items you want to sell. If there's an agreement to that end, fine. But, is it really the vendor's responsibility to do that? Do your sales of their products make it beneficial to them to hold inventory just for you? It's also not their responsibility to manage your PO's. It sounds as though you're dealing with a wholesaler and have to meet quantity minimums to by products. Is there some reason that you should not be subject to those minimums? If so, I'd think again, it would have been discussed and documented before now. You could solve the issue of credit card charges by not charging the customer for back ordered items in the first place, assuming you know your vendor's inventory levels (but that appears to be the basis of the problem). Alternatively, you could charge the customer's card manually before you ship. I think if you read your credit card agreements, there is a requirement that product is shipped within a specific amount of time after the card is authorized. If your vendor is hesitant to give you access to their servers, ask them to provide a daily file to you to update your inventory, giving them access to your server. You're expecting your vendor to mold their processes to accommodate you. IMHO, you need to be a little more humble here, and alter YOUR business processes to work better with your vendor(s). Unless, of course, you're their largest customer. Thank, Dave Bellevue -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Reil Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 11:45 AM To: discussion@acfug.org Subject: [ACFUG Discuss] Vendor Data Problem (funny) For a good laugh on how not to run a business read this. Read from the bottom up for a laugh, and please advise me if I am correct in my assumptions that my proposal would work... Respectfully... Robert P. Reil Managing Director, Motorcyclecarbs.com, Inc. 4292 Country Garden Walk NW Kennesaw, Ga. 30152 Office 770-974-8851 Fax 770-974-8852 www.motorcyclecarbs.com ---------------------------------------------------- Thanks Martin: Both ways is how I meant it. There are securities that can be set up as described below that Svetlana may not be considering. You would own and hold the page secure and Svetlana would authorize the page. Once the page is built and authorized we just call the page. Is it possible for me to email her to further discuss the technicalities of doing such? I think the 2 of us talking tech for a couple letters would yield a secure win-win solution. You can forward the following for her to better understand where we are coming from and our end goal. ------------- Svetlana: We are using a ColdFusion driven JAVA cart named AbleCommerce. AbleCommerce is able to HOST many stores. But we only use one store, as we are not a Store Hosting Company. Using this feature we have had to assign unavailable products to a store with a different ID than our store. This results in the ability to toggle on and off the unavailable products. What we would like to be able to do is to do a stored procedure in our MySQL server to go to Martin's Database. You set up the securities so that all the customer (we) can do is run a SELECT statement. (Martin: Select means view only) You would give us an account and password and that is all we have to even get the results of the SELECT privilege. You would further only be giving us access to SELECT PARTNO (of that table) INVENTORY STATUS (of that table). I am positive you can secure this info in the User Security portion of your DB program. You see you have the ability to say what username and password can get in. And once in that user can only view the above mentioned items. With the DB location, name, username, and password we should be able to have our Stored Procedure call the PartNumber, and its status (in stock, not in stock) Theory is that if we can run this SP say twice a day then we will know what Martin has in stock. And have that logic toggle that item in our store to being in or out of inventory in our store. This is basically all I need. However some less sophisticated companies may want to have something similar based on an ASP that you generate to have in their site. Alternatively if you can not or will not we could create a page on our site with a snippet of code that calls your ASP content as a frame or cell content if possible. But it would not allow the items to be listed in our cart or searchable on our site, and many sales opportunities would be lost. ----------- Thanks for listening Martin... I hope that you can see the win-win in this and that Svetlana can understand the simplicity and security functions of Database Applications. Robert P. Reil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Martin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 8:53 PM To: Robert Reil Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: I beg you. Please dont read this till you have a clear mind. Hi Robert...I will agree to the second paragraph Hi Martin, Not sure I understand what he is talking about. To give access to the database to other companies could not be save, because they can delete all data or change prices or something else. I would strongly recommend NOT give access to the database to others. On opposite side if they need to create some asp page with specific information, or have already created asp page and they want to put it to our server and that page will access our database - it could be done. But that page will be on our server and they will not have access to the code on that page after implementing on our server. Thanks, Svetlana ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reil To: Martin Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 6:55 PM Subject: RE: I beg you. Please dont read this till you have a clear mind. Thanks so much Martin. This is more than fair. Finally some forward progress. I look forward to hearing what is said by Svetlana. Thank you. Robert P. Reil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Martin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 6:44 PM To: Robert Reil Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: I beg you. Please dont read this till you have a clear mind. Robert I am not blowing you off to Harry, I pay Harry almost 100k/ year to run things, Harry does most of the web updates and I have forwarded your e-mail to my web girl...believe me I want nothing more than NOT to be out of stock of kits.....Harry hears about it from me daily....I will wait to here back from what Svetlana says and Harry about it. ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reil To: Martin Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 5:47 PM Subject: I beg you. Please dont read this till you have a clear mind. Martin: Please read this dialogue in its entirety from beginning to end. I beg you to have an open mind and realize that not only is my proposed solution ULTRA simple but it would also allow ANY or your DEALER customers to use this tool safely to be able to represent your products on line without your company name being listed. This solution would take a maximum of one hour to set up and if I could have just 10 minutes time of who ever set up your website and database we could figure out an easy way to make this work. I could get all technical but basically if I had a copy of one file on your web server I would be able to rename it, remove some of the parts.asp file contents to remove your navigation name, etc, etc and know what data to call. (Note this file is not the same one seen on your site, as the ASP file is a bit different on your server than what internet customers have access to.) Then once the parts.asp file is renamed and skinned down you would just put the file back right next to the parts.asp file and we customers would make a link to that copied file to show our customers what is available in your inventory and the retail customer on your dealer customer's web site would NEVER know that it was being purchased from you. The Dealer wins, you win, everyone wins. Please, Please, Please help me help you help me... I know I am becoming a pest to some of you, and I don't want that at all. But I am desparate to find a way for our relationship work. Can I at least have the webmaster's phone number? That person will tell you how simple, easy and secure this is... Lets do it this way: Cons of pursuing this: Will take time to read this letter in it's entirety Will take time to contact the webmaster or give me their number Will take the webmaster up to one hour of labor. Pros of pursuing this Will allow EVERY Dealer customer the ability to provide better customer service. Will give KEYSTER a better name as more dealers will sell it. Will minimize email questions. Will make me a very happy Dealer as our sales will increase when it comes to your product. You will never hear from me again about problems from how I see it. Please read the history of our and Harry's conversation. And think about it for a while. Don't respond to this immediately but do think about it and let me know. As I said below to Harry I am forced to stop representing your products in our cart due to the costs and difficulty in doing so. But I also explain why there is an amazingly simple work around which would make this a wonder full win-win situation for both of us. PS. Please do me the decency to reply personally and not blow me off to Harry. He doesn't seem to have time to give me a well thought out answer. Robert P. Reil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 4:17 PM To: Robert Reil Subject: Re: Phone call Sorry sir not sure what your question means, however we do not wished to be involved in your order processing or inventory system sir. You will have to work with what you have. Thanks Harry ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reil To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 1:31 PM Subject: RE: Phone call Harry I know you are busy, but what does.... "Sounds good" mean? Is this something that you will pursue? Or deny? Im confused at your reply. Robert P. Reil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 1:23 PM To: Robert Reil Subject: Re: Phone call Ok sir sounds good Thanks Harry ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reil To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 12:40 PM Subject: RE: Phone call I thank you for this real answer and your info on the CB650 79/80. This morning we have removed your product line from our shopping cart. But please be aware that we desperately wish to fix that. It would seem that the problems with back orders and availability are literally adding about 20 hours a week to my work load and the expense of the refunds brings us to a financial break even point. In a work around I am developing a web page that would be able to pull data from your server and tell me what is and is not in stock. However when testing this page your server returned a complete page with all your contact info. Is it possible to work with your Database Administrator in order to have a tool that will check this? If not our potential sales of your product will decrease drastically as that is really the only way I can sell them. I understand your situation, and I am sure you can understand mine. But based on the tools we have we either have to be able to access your inventory status, or stop supporting your product in our cart which pains us deeply. One added note: Our shopping cart has the following functions. We can tell it to email a vendor (YOU) a purchase order upon having a customer place an order. We can make a piece of logic that can have our Database server to check your server every "x" increment so to check inventory. We can toggle items on and off in the cart with ease and have all this happen behind the scenes. If you can support the DB request this will make this work perfectly from now on as here is what will happen. Our cart will only list available items based on the last report your server returned. The order we get will be emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The order will come, and we will never need to talk again! Every one wins! What do you think? Robert P. Reil ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 8:08 PM To: Robert Reil Subject: Re: Phone call Ok robert this is the best method to order from us. Check our website for in stock status. Kits that are sold out with a picture we normally stock. Order the product through [EMAIL PROTECTED] email If out we'll let you know, please check back in time frame mention in our reply If a non stock item we can order in if Keyster will manufacture - minimum 20 kit order - 3 moths lead time We will not be watching your back orders or P.O.'s, but we will email you when kits you were looking for arrive. You decide what is needed to do to sell based on this system. Thanks Harry ----- Original Message ----- From: Martin To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 5:06 PM Subject: Fw: Phone call <!-- Side note(Notice Martin (business owner) forwards this to his #1 guy who historically doesn't give good info...) --> ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Reil To: Martin Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 1:42 PM Subject: Phone call Martin: I tried to call you on the phone today but could not reach you. Any how, I need to discuss with you the problems we are having with selling your items. Here is my dilemma. -------------------- The below orders I took in our cart. Granted we have not yet removed your unsupported items from our cart yet but we are today as my data manager is back from time away. As you know the credit card company takes money from the sale on the way in, and when the customer is alerted that the item is B/O for 90 days chances are they will want a refund and the credit card company will take money out on the way back as well. Including s/h charges billed to the customer on the sale, the total came to about $280 in sales. Say roughly 7% of the sale is taken for card fees on the way in and out combined this would be a total of almost $20 for a weekends worth of automated sales and our volume is increasing. I am understanding that these kits are items that are supposed to be stocked based on the KH spreadsheet Harry sent a month ago and the KK, KS, KY email he sent last week. Note that "*" denotes not in the list of available products. KH-0526N- out until early November * KH-0128- instock KH-0581N- out until early November KH-0527N- out until early November KH-0229N- out until early November KH-0116- out until early November KH-0025N - out until early November KK-0044 - in stock KH-1095- out until early November * Based on the above, five out of seven products (that I was told were inventory items) are back ordered till November. I have to ask myself... What is the norm here? Are these fluke anomalies? Is the spread sheet of items that are supposed to be stocked incorrect? Are the items that are not in the spread sheet supposed to be stocked? (if so why are the not in the spreadsheet, or if not then why are they on back order to be sold later? Did Harry possibly send me a list of what just happened to be in inventory at the time with no regard to what you TRY TO KEEP IN STOCK? Martin, I'm really confused... All I need to know is: What you TRY to stock. (I assume the data that was sent to me is correct and I will attach it for your review) I hope you can see that I have reason to believe that the data given to us is less than correct. And that we are really struggling trying to sell you products and it is costing us more than we have margin to cover. I really want to be able to support your product line but I am afraid that I am realistically considering if it is cost effective to keep your product line in our cart. Can you please call me on the phone or give me a number and time to call you so that we can further discuss these issues? ---------------- Robert P. 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