Am I in the wrong or right here? (PB Tech) question

Hey guys!

First up: Like any organisation, Hanlon's Razor applies. Things are usually a mistake or oversight well before they're a malicious scheme. Most organisations I've worked for and with, including the biggest names out there, are far too busy with BAU to rub their hands together, cackle manically, and execute anything intentionally devious. :)

Regarding stock levels on Cyber Monday: With help from the management and development teams (All of PB's core systems are internally developed and maintained), I put together an FAQ for some of the weird-looking stuff with stock levels that customers asked about after Cyber Monday. This was essentially a case of what's clear-cut internally not necessarily seeming so clear-cut externally, i.e. the difference between supplier stock and PB stock. Plus there was a conscious effort to learn from last year's Cyber Monday (In a stroke of excellent timing, I started at PB the day before Black Friday last year...), in which backorders were allowed. Suppliers could not deliver some backorders in the quantities requested, since it turned out they simply didn't have the stock on hand that their automatic feeds said they did, so it was a crappy experience for the poor folks who backordered. In a nutshell, we didn't want to oversell and be unable to deliver.

Behind the scenes, the dev team set up a buffer of 1-2 units of some products - which were store stock rather than head office stock - for a couple of good reasons. Firstly, because the stores simply can't perform a full stocktake between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so can't guarantee the store stock levels are 100% accurate. It's a massive sale and stuff can and does go missing or get stolen. Fact of retail. That, and if it was all present and accounted for, it would leave 1-2 units that could be delivered to folks who missed out for whatever reason on a case-by-case basis if needed. That's why some products with, say, 2 units left may have seemed to disappear during Cyber Monday.

We also turned off the supplier feeds during the sale because experience says the supplier feeds aren't as concrete as we'd like them to be outside of day-to-day orders - e.g. they'll happily accommodate an order of 5 units, but an order of 500 may not actually be in their local warehouses and may have a how-long's-a-piece-of-string lead time. Also because loads of stuff is below cost on Cyber Monday and the intention is to sell what we have to our customers rather than empty the entire supply to NZ for the foreseeable future.

On the Mate 8 specifically: Mate 8 was a Black Friday hero product at a crazy low price - I told the product manager I'd happily line up any day of the week for one of those at ~$449 when it was first floated - and there was stock in the hundreds rather than the teens. All products that were advertised on Black Friday and were still in stock Cyber Monday were sold at the Black Friday prices online, but the superhero crazy-price doorbusters weren't advertised as Cyber Monday specials because we knew there wouldn't be enough left post Black Friday to meet reasonable demand. Wasn't gonna say "Hey everyone we've got refurb Galaxy S6s for $399, come get some!" when there were only three left, y'know? Mate 8 was in that boat.

It does strike me as odd that five units reappeared at head office, as the buffer was strictly store stock only, but I suspect what's happened there is either cancelled orders, or people pounced on them immediately when the sale went live, and then didn't complete the sale for whatever reason (Possibly our payment gateway provider's assurances that there would be enough capacity to cover 50k+ orders at 6pm, cough cough).

Good news is, there's still four left, and I'm glad there are for reasons exactly like this: If you're still interested in a Mate 8, drop me a line at nik(dot)turner(at)pbtech.co.nz and we'll get one to you at the sale price.

Hope that helps.

BillieJoe

NikT