Currys Black Friday debacle...

RockersWAG

Fosterdog wrote: »

Yes I’m sure they did it to keep the interest which would be less than £5 and chose to have to tie up a phone line and pay a member of staff to deal with it, plus any transaction processing fees they may have. Losing money is clearly the main objective in business.;)

Except I'm sure it wasn't just me and my '£5' they profited from. It's not difficult to set a limit on a website product to stop more being ordered once they're out of stock. I'm sure there were plenty of others who also handed over a few quid to Currys whether they wanted to or not, whether on this product like me or many others they did the same on.
Why else allow over-ordering on a known end of line product when you could simply stop any more orders when your stock limit is reached? Even a simple Wordpress website lets you do that.
End of line means just that - it's been discontinued so you can't get any more. And Currys knew that when they dropped it to almost half price for Black Friday, as all the other mixers in a different colour were just £50 off.
I'm still put off Currys for life, either way. :-)

spadoosh

RockersWAG wrote: »

Except I'm sure it wasn't just me and my '£5' they profited from. It's not difficult to set a limit on a website product to stop more being ordered once they're out of stock. I'm sure there were plenty of others who also handed over a few quid to Currys whether they wanted to or not, whether on this product like me or many others they did the same on.
Why else allow over-ordering on a known end of line product when you could simply stop any more orders when your stock limit is reached? Even a simple Wordpress website lets you do that.
End of line means just that - it's been discontinued so you can't get any more. And Currys knew that when they dropped it to almost half price for Black Friday, as all the other mixers in a different colour were just £50 off.
I'm still put off Currys for life, either way. :-)

I don tknow which one you bought but ill take a rough middle figure of £350. Your looking at about 1-2% interest rate if your lucky. Ill go to the extrem and say 2%. Assuming they had your money for a full month theyre looking at about £0.58 in interest. I dont know how many kitchenaid currys will sell as a result of the offer but if

10 products sold = £5.80
100 products sold = £58.00
1,000 products = £580.00
10,000 products = £5800.00

Ill point out its pretty rare for businesses to sell something at a loss. Even on the good offers. It can and does happen but the majority of stuff gets sold above cost price. On that basis i would have to assume that currys where selling the on offer product at a profit (above cost). On something that costs ~£200+ the profit margin you would imagine (even on an offer item) would be more than £0.58. From that its fairly safe to assume that their is no business sense in not fulfilling the order in benefit of receiving interest. The publicity, complaints, customer handling, processing would reduce that 58p substantially too.


As someone who used to work in retail i can contest the accuracies of stock databases. I would regular be sent customer from other stores to be told we had several of an item in stock, all to often i would have to tell the customer we didnt. On the reverse i would always contact a store who was showing they had stock, firstly i knew our database only ever updated overnight and didnt work real time. Secondly its a business witha high turnover of goods. That inevitably leads to discrepancies in stock holdings. Things like theft, damages, returns, recalled batches, mislabeled batches most of which you dont realise until a stock take (unlikely to happen to be around the days youll order something) or until orders are placed and you no longer have any product to fulfil orders.


They might be trying to skim some money off customers. But i cant help but imagine that its an incredibly risky tactic for very little reward when they have a basic business model, which isnt really risky at all (sell something people want to buy at a price theyre willing to pay). It doesnt usually end well for companies who are found to be scamming their customers.

That in itself wouldnt put me off currys, in fact i would think it a decent gesture they gave me £15. Although if i took your stance i would find £15 worth of products to use the voucher on, my first port of call would be any 3rd part vouchers they sell (amazon) and then use that voucher to buy the goods you wanted, i think most places exclude voucher purchases using vouchers though and then never shop their again.

takman

RockersWAG wrote: »

I had almost the exact same experience with the Currys PC World deal on a KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer.
It was clearly an end of line product (as in the colour had been discontinued), as it was the only one of all the colours with such a big discount but even though I knew this would likely be the case, as the Currys website showed it has being in stock (and continued to show as in stock into the Saturday before the product disappeared completely from the Currys website), I was confident that Currys had enough stock in to fulfill my order.
Currys must have known they would not get in any more stock in addition to their existing number, as this same colour of mixer was the only one with such a big discount with several other online retailers too.
Call me a cynic but I find it highly suspicious that I had several emails over the 10-12 days after my order on Black Friday assuring me they would be sending my order as soon as they had it back in stock, only to wait until November (and the weekend banking limitations) were well and truly passed before issuing me with an automatic refund on 6th December because they 'couldn't fulfill' the order.
I told the customer service operator I spoke to when I called to complain about how they had gone about it that I strongly suspected Currys was fully aware it would get no more stock than it already had, knowingly oversold the product online and then fobbed off the customers who bought with enough reassurances over the next few days that we wouldn't ask for our money back before December.
That meant Currys could pocket the month-end interest on our cash while it sat in their bank until November was over, meaning they could profit despite the refund. Funnily enough, he became rather uncomfortable and told me he couldn't comment on the business side of Currys PC World!
Shoddy and I would even say dishonest service from Currys PC World. I won't be buying from them again.

The cost of them processing your order and refunding you plus any contact you had with customer services would cost them far more money than any interest they would get.

That's without even considering the "cost" of annoying customers who can then give them bad publicity and reduce the chance of them buying from them in the future.

But I'm sure the reason the customer service operator sounded "uncomfortable" was because they were trying not to laugh at the stupidly of your comments.