Quote:
Originally Posted by MateoinLosAngeles
So yeah, that indicates to me that the website inventory isn't automated. I don't even think it's linked to their e-commerce platform, so even if they have, say, 30 of a plant and 48 people order it, it won't be taken down from the website until someone does it manually.
|
There was one time when I tried to buy several flasks from SVO and Fred (or was it Jose?) insisted that they were out of stock even though the flask list showed half a dozen in stock. So I kept pushing back to get clarification. I'm not sure if they're really that busy or don't want to divulge some things, but they never gave me clear answers. Finally, they relented and sent me an internal spreadsheet of their stock numbers, which
still didn't reflect everything they said were out of stock.
Suffice to say, it's clear that it's all manual, and I'm guessing every time Fred ships an order, they decrement the daily internal inventory list (spreadsheet). But they ship all the orders for the week on the same day, so the inventory is off later in the week... or something like that. They should really be keeping an inventory for when they pull the items instead.
I tried to order a Laelia anceps 'Marble Queen' division once, and the request was ignored until I sent a second email, which was delegated to Jose who insisted they had no such thing in stock, despite it still being on their divisions list even to this day. But between then and now I had a chat with Tim Culbertson (twculbertson on ebay) about some divisions he had, and it turned out that Tim was able to get some stuff for me that would've been difficult for me to order directly from other vendors (e.g. Afri Orchids from South Africa). And so I got my 'Marble Queen' from Tim too. Being that they're both in Oceanside, it's possible that Tim got that one from SVO
I probably wouldn't bother Tim for normal offerings, but if I want a specific cultivar or something rare, it seems more fruitful to contact him through ebay than to ask SVO directly.
---------- Post added at 02:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:53 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by MateoinLosAngeles
The irony of it all is that they probably pay someone to do the website, but they have such a basic one that they could probably create/hire someone to create something on Squarespace or Shopify that they could easily update since those already have integrated inventory systems.
|
Since I'm unemployed at the moment, I wouldn't mind making one of these for free, but I guess there would probably be liability issues for taking freelance work. I tried to give Andy's an updated logo once, since back when his new site first went up all the logos were really fuzzy, but I didn't hear anything back and a couple days later their team updated the logos similarly.
Hybrid Mode
