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Originally Posted by MarylandSpeed
You are not ordering many aftermarket parts then. Even Amazon dropships a ton of parts. I doubt any vendor here has a dropship rate less than 80% of their orders. I always laugh because people are so quick to bash something that helps them normally the second it does not go their way. Dropshipping works FOR them in most cases. For instance, I can ship a brand like Borla from my warehouse, Borla's warehouse, or 8 wholesalers. Backorders are much lower than if it can only come from my warehouse because I have so many sources. That means when it is on backorder, it really is...a lot of people don't have it. Not only that..if we are dealing with a wholesaler, they often have multiple warehouses around the country. I can't tell you how many times we have customers on the west coast get parts in 1-2 days because we used a wholesaler with a warehouse there..where if I were only shipping from my warehouse it will take a week. Dropshipping works until everyone runs out of stock.
The "order taker" thing is funny. Go to your local speed shop and try to order the stuff we sell. You will thumb through some catalogs, pick parts out, pay them, and be told to come back in a week. That is because they stock nothing and have to order it from the same places we do.
One other factor is not everything sells all the time. For instance..I would say 20% of the parts on our site we regularly sell. 30% seldom sell (1-2 a month). The rest seldom or has never sold. So if we are gonna limit what we list on our site to only what is on hand...that would be determined by what parts sell and lead to much smaller selection.
The only places that actually only sell what they have on their shelf is Summit and Jegs. That is because they are actually wholesalers that sell direct to the public. Summit for instance also sells under the name Atech..and pretty much every speed shop out their has an account with them. The downside though is they charge more because they have to protect their wholesale business. No speedshop would want to buy from ATECH if they sold parts cheaper to the public through Summit.
In terms of saying it is "in stock"...our website does not use those words anywhere. I had that custom coded. Most shopping cart software however is in stock (on), or out of stock (off). This does not really account for dropshipping, which 90% of the time
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This is so true! If I need a part quickly I usually call the supplier first to find out if the part is in stock. This way there are no surprises down the road. We have turned into a society of instant gratification and if we don't get our way we can go online and complain. Granted, every shop is going to have issues once in a while but shops like Maryland Speed normally communicate with you and explain where the delay is.
I have used vendors who are sponsors here on Camaro5 and have nothing but horrible service but I don't bash them on the forums, I just don't use them again. Rant over....