I've explained it more times than Drafter has looked for CROS -
Other auction sites aren't retail sites with auction prices. We're not sitting her with a few boxes from our own personal humidors posting product one item at a time. Our humidor is approximately 370,000 cubic feet of space, 2 1/2 stories high with product floor to ceiling. If you include the area where we store product that doesn't need humidification, where humidors, pipes, shirts, etc is kept, the storage area is nearly doubled. At any given time we have about 25 million cigars in our humidor. That's a lot of product to keep track of but we actually do a pretty good job of it.
Each time we list a lot on this site, inventory is hidden from view. It remains on the shelves, of course, but its not visible to anyone who might be looking for it in our database. We ship on average 10,000 packages each day, 6 days a week. Now, lets say someone orders a sampler but the person picking the product picks the wrong item. The person who puts it in the box sees that both the one on the invoice and the one going into the box have 20 cigars so they don't look much further. Whooops! out goes the wrong sampler. And lets say that happens 10x each day. Now our inventory is off - more on one item, less on another.
So, we list a sampler on CBid. Inventory says we have 10 in stock but in reality there's only 8 because of those picking errors. And a backorder is born!
We've done what we can based on the technology of it, but there's always the human factor and that's what tricks us up each time.
As for 'bait and switch' - I don't see how that applies here when we often offer a larger size, a higher quantity, a better sampler, etc. than what was won. We do our best to accommodate the inconvenience our customers feel when an error like this happens and we're constantly working to make the process better. In the case of this particular sampler, its tough to come up with a substitute because of the components of it. I'll have one of the supervisors contact you with some suggestions for a substitution that might work for you.
Any questions, email or inbox me.
TrishS@CigarBid wrote:
