I don't know why this is so hard for retailers to figure out. Valve has an excellent system. Let me give you a down payment, five dollars, ten, whatever. Put my name on a list and when its my turn to buy give me a few days to purchase, and if not refund and move on to the next person.
It's like all these retailers forgot backordering was a thing.
They could even store the address and limit to one order per x period of time.
I don't think it's quite that simple. I'm not in the business, but every time this comes up someone points out that stores don't actually always buy inventory. Often times they are simply selling the shelf space and it's up to distributors to stock it themselves.
I can't imagine they are making their product on an order-by-order basis. Nor would they be buying supplies for their product that way, and selling back supplies is not a frictionless process. Of course there is a stockpile.
If you're running a brick and mortar store, you want to serve the customers who are there now. That means not cannibalizing your inventory by mailing to someone who ordered last week. You also want people to come back to your store.
It is irrational for the store to mail you one when it comes in stock, though they should have a web-based corporate distributor that they can direct you to.
In isolation on one purchase, yes. But much like the introduction of credit cards, it's made consuption frictionless and so more purchases are being made than might otherwise would have been. Also, packaging from shipping, facilitating for returns (depending on retailer)
I mean the whole gimmick is about off-loading hard-to-sell inventory at immense mark-ups by bundling items together. Yea some absurd combinations will be sent back but it will still profit an order of magnitude more then displaying it in a department store for months. A lot more room for JIT style and data-driven logistics without the lag-time of presenting within a store.
You can't be that mad at a company when it is so obvious what their value proposition and consequences are to a consumer.
Because manufacturers don't typically have their own fulfillment infrastructure for retail-sized orders?
What you're proposing with somebody buying a bulk order and divvying it up is basically describing what the existing retailers do. The reputable ones are worrying about their reputations.
Retailers that aren't big enough to do this themselves go through suppliers, who in turn handle breaking a bulk order down into units to sell to smaller retailers. Those suppliers are worried about their reputations too, you just don't see that because you largely don't see them.
I was speaking about my Best Buy Retail experience but they do have other large operations that are different.
I’m not sure what drugs the Shipping people are on though - we routinely shuffled 40+ unsold copies of The Benchwarmers into a bye bye crate and they’d show back up a month later but 50+. They were inventory gaming and probably doing some book cooking now when I look back on it.
Preorders generate risk for a business, because you take money and owe a customer goods, potentially for months. You cannot spend that money because you need to be able to refund it, but you're also carrying the risk of storing and protecting that money because it's technically yours.
If the date, costs and shipping of the next batch aren't even known yet, it makes no sense to open up for preorders. Also, the company risks taking on more preorders than stock they can get their hands on, which will only help to disappoint customers who will have to wait more weeks for the next batch to arrive. There's a lot that can go wrong for the company.
If it took more than a few days to sell out for each batch, it might make sense because it'd allow for the store to be sure that their entire volume is moved. From what I've seen, these watches go out of stock in hours. There's no need for the store to carry risks to make ordering extra convenient for its customers because they will sell out regardless.
There's benefits for batching orders before you back order from the factory, but there's also downsides. From a business standpoint, I don't see the advantage of taking on back orders for a product that sells out instantly anyway.
If you're anxious to by the Pinetime, the hardware is practically the same as the Colmi P8 if I recall correctly, and the open source OS can be flashed on that with some extra steps you can find online. You can find that watch, and many similar ones, on your favourite Chinese import website. You lose the official support, but you'd get your hands on a hackable watch without setting a calender reminder.
I would expect they handle this the way that brick and mortar stores do: estimating future sales and not purchasing excess inventory from the distributor.
It's common practice for retailers to push many of those costs (as many as they can) back on the suppliers.
For example, Walgreens expects ITS VENDORS to stock the shelves, cycle expired product, and install and replace in-store advertising. Walgreens doesn't do it themselves.
And as for sales, often a supplier is required to buy back stock that goes unsold after a period of time. It's crazy, but that's how much power retailers have.
It's not as technically difficult as it seems - see this discssion somewhere else in the thread. Definitely no crooked supply chain needed, except for the "don't ask, don't tell" mindset.
They could backorder them like everyone else does. Advertise a product and price. Accept orders at that price for existing stock and scheduled deliveries. And repeat that process as more become available.
As an optimization, allow a fixed-sized queue of "pre-orders" at the same price. Though you have to be careful with this because you're selling things you aren't guaranteed to get. Amazon can cover the losses from mistakes here, small vendors can't.
Yev from Backblaze here -> Most of our purchasing is done through distributors. We'd love to buy direct at some point, but for now we have good manufacturer/distributor relationships! We're getting there though!
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