A plea to moulding distributors

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Rainbow
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A plea to moulding distributors

Post by Rainbow »

A recent customer had two pictures to frame and chose two different mouldings. I checked that both were available on the distributor's web site and he placed the order. However, when I came to order from the distributor, it turned out that both were discontinued, and for only one of them there was a small amount of stock available. My relief that I didn't have to tell the customer that both were in fact unavailable was offset by disappointment and concern that the distributor hadn't kept their web site up to date.

So this is a plea to distributors to please keep your web sites up to date.

I feel it's bad enough to sometimes have to tell customers that the stock I've received is nothing like the sample, but at least the quality of mouldings isn't the distributors' fault. However, portraying a moulding as being available when it isn't, leads to a further undermining of the professional service which surely all of us try to give.

Thank you.
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by Not your average framer »

This has always been a bit of a difficult area. It is probably not unreasonable to say that moulding distributors are a bit like "piggy in the middle" and are doing their best to cope with getting the best prices while the pounds is not getting good exchange rates with overseas suppliers, plus selling the mouldings at a price where there is sufficient return and volume of sales.

In an ideal world there would be plenty of staff to stay of top of things like this, but in the real world the number of staff employed is a difficult issue, when I comes to balancing the books, plus there's never enough hours in the day to do everything at the same time. I'm quite impressed that things work as well as they still do. I can't remember a time when this was not an issue and I'm not expecting things to be much different any time soon.
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prospero
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by prospero »

:lol: Mark has just about nailed the situation.

That's life as we know it. :roll:

To be fair, most suppliers will go to great lengths (no pun :)) to try and make things right for the customer. But they
are at the mercy of their suppliers.

Continuity of supply is another reason I switched to hand-finishing many years ago.
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Steve N
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by Steve N »

I know how you feel Rainbow, the other month I kept ordering a moulding as it was in stock on the website with a quantity of something like 766 (does not say whether that is feet, meters, inches, cm, or mm) and kept being told it was out of stock, then one week I checked about another moulding, it said out of stock, but I thought " hell I'm going to order it !" guess what it was in stock but the original was still out of stock, when the young lady rang me to tell me, I asked why they bother with even with putting the stock on their website when it total waste of time, she said she would pass my comments on to one of the directors.
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by kartoffelngeist »

I do generally have a lot of sympathy for framing suppliers. I get that they're doing their best and caught between suppliers and customers.

but...

Surely keeping your website up to date is a fairly basic part of running a business now? The only decent websites I've seen are Lion and Mainline. Everyone else's is full of discontinued lines and doesn't have new lines.

I do feel like we give suppliers a lot of leeway because many framers know that it's better than it used to be.

We wouldn't accept it if we ordered two of something from Amazon and they sent two that were different colours or slightly different sizes. We'd send it back if it was slightly damaged and we'd be pretty unhappy if they said it was in stock then came back later and said it was oos.
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Rainbow
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by Rainbow »

I agree, kartoffeingeist. The distributors are at the mercy of the manufacturers when it comes to quality issues, and they do their best to rectify any shortcomings in quality (although it's more expensive all-round to spend time rectifying problems than it would be if the product was right in the first place). But I don't think we should make excuses for them, particularly when it comes to updating their web sites. It should be easy enough to do in-house so that they're not spending money on external services, and it's a pretty basic element in the scheme of things. A supplier's out-of-date web site impacts on my own quality of service, as well as causing me lost time and money. If I'm being expected to spend a signficant amount of time sorting out the mess caused by deleted lines still being listed on web sites, then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect my suppliers to spend some of their time being more vigilant about keeping their web sites up to date. That's my view anyway!
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Steve N
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Re: A plea to moulding distributors

Post by Steve N »

I totally agree with you Rainbow, what's the use of putting stock values on the website, when they are not kept up to date,

Another pet hate is one supplier (you know who you are :nod: ) who's moulding ref numbering is up the creak, ref number in the catalogue, under the photo of the moulding, is different from the price list or the website, '0's either added or taken out :head: :head: so if you are searching on the website, you have to work your way through all the combinations, adding '0's on at the beginning or after the '/' or both, or taking the '0's out :head: :swear:
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