So as I mentioned in a previous post, I make a hobby of car audio. Well the other day I ordered a new amplifier to power my subwoofer from a company online. Since I ordered it on Friday, I assumed it would ship to me at the beginning of the following week. Monday, Tuseday… nothing yet…Wednesday, Thursday…still hasn’t shipped! So I call the company and they politely inform me that the product I ordered is out of stock and they won’t be receiving any more.
They then asked if I wanted a comparable product off the site. After choosing several models, I was informed that all the models were out of stock. I then asked, “So what DO you have in stock?” and after five minutes he told me they had a no-name crap amplifier they could give me instead. After a week of fighting with them I told them to just cancel my order.
So what is the point of this you ask? Remember when your parents used to say, “There’s an easy way and a hard way…”? Well there is a right and a wrong way to do business, and the example above, is the wrong way. I understand that inventory constantly changes but according to my research, over HALF of the products I was looking at on their site were out of stock.
As a business owner you have a responsibility to your customers to make their buying experience as pleasant, mutually beneficial, and easy as possible. When you fail to do all three of these things, you have an issue, to say the least. Had they paid someone to update the site frequently, they would not have had to pay the customer service representatives to handle the issue for two hours, they could have turned a profit instead of alienating a customer, and I wouldn’t be writing this blog about them now!
So the lesson we learn here today folks is that keeping your business up to date not only helps you but if it is not done right, it can cause great harm. Be diligent and it will pay off because if you make the mistakes the above company does, you won’t be around for too long. Now more than ever good business is key to survival because as people spend less, they are more picky about where the money is spent. Is someone more likely to give their money to a company they trust or a company that doesn’t even know what it has in inventory? Obviously, the trusted company. So who do you want to be?
Filed under: Business | Tagged: amplifier, bad, Bad Business, burning, burning money, Business, business weekly, car audio, Don't do this, Good business, How not to do business, how to fail, how to make money, how to run a business, how to succeed, money, profit, weekly biz, weekly business, what not to do, wrong, you suck at life
As a customer, that is one of the most annoying things a company can do! Great post!
You have some excellent ideas. You should consider doing on the side coaching for people who suck at life –er.. business!