omission that I will amend
Hey Doug - our website is 100% live, it is run by our custom enterprise system that controls our entire inventory for both our back-office suite and the consumer site. The only way that a bottle is mis-represented in the system is if it was checked-in incorrectly by our acquisitions team or if our automated appraisal system mis-tagged the wine - both of which does happen, we see a massive amount of wines per month and each is assigned it’s own SKU so that we can track provenance.
I managed the development of our system from the ground up - an almost two year process and we continue to improve upon the platform. [said while writing the spec for new features to be launched this fall…]
very cool - are there ever any issues reconciling phone orders with web orders?
I agree with Alan 1000%. It was 100% until I knew his card was charged. The fact that everyone gets screwed doesn’t make it right. If you just allow bad behavior to continue without complaint, the bad behavior will never be corrected. If they conspicuously said “orders accepted subject to allocation and available inventory” and credit card was not charged, then I might feel differently. The only reason I can see that charging a credit card before they accept your order without telling you that they intend to do so is not the crime of theft is because in New York, theft requires intent to permanently deprive and they only deprived you until they decided to give the money back.
I think that this stinks and it would be better for all involved if Alan received the wines that he ordered. However the thing that I get a kick out of is the fairly common use of the boards to discuss retailer and winery faux pas’. I’m not singling Alan out, there are hundreds of these types of posts and responses over the years. There are several common responses:
- it’s frustrating but shit happens
- There was a contract and it was breached and there are laws that cover this
- I’m so angry I will never shop there again.
I usually fall into the first category. I’m curious to know if anyone ever took a wine store to court over an issue like I’ve described in the second category? I’m not talking Rare LLC (Wallace) where there was theft, more so the inventory foul up described above. With regard to the third issue, if we all refused to shop at the stores outed on the boards over the years for various issues, we wouldn’t have any place left to shop. I’ve seen some of my favorite stores get bashed and some of my least favorite stores get kudos.
Bottom line, is that while it’s frustrating, it happens and there’s not a lot that can be done so we can choose to get upset and vent or we can choose to brush it off and move onto the next deal. Nobody is perfect and mistakes will always be made. It’s part of life. As a matter of fact, my wife tells me I make at least one mistake a day. I figure I’m doing pretty well if it’s only one mistake.
Must have been some kick-ass wine at bargain basement price to get this kind of reaction 
For the record, I’ve had things like this happen to me, but never thought there was anything sinister or shoddy about it. Stuff happens, particularly if there is a sale of high demand wine at good prices.
Not having your physical inventory linked real time to your web inventory in 2014 is silly.
Just for clarity, I think you are referring to Rare LLC (Wallace), not Rare Wine Co. (Mannie Berk), which has a good rep.
They shouldn’t have charged the card until verifying stock. But a correction after 2 days makes it a pretty minor fault to me.
That was actually a big hurdle for us - most existing systems are not set-up to deal with products that are in short supply. So in a situation where a customer is on the website placing an order and one of our sales reps is placing an order in our back-end POS for the same bottle, the old system would just allow both orders to go through because it would only check stock with bottles were ADDED to the cart, not when they actually placed the order. You can imagine the customer service headaches this caused, so that was a contributing factor when making the decision to develop a custom system.
The new system checks stock at the time orders are placed and assigns the ‘winner’ automatically - whether that is to customers on the website or a combo of Benchmark employees and website customers. The above seems simple, however it was quite a challenge to actually make it work properly.
thanks mike, i don’t think it seems simple at all and it’s impressive how you’ve accomplished it.
Generally, Sherry Lehman’s service is an abomination. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone unattended in that store, waiving my arms for assistance, while some obviously foreign tourist loads up on Bordeaux. At times they have some interesting burgs at favorable pricing (surprisingly, their pricing is often competitive with Garnet and Crush where the inventory overlaps), but the process of shopping there is so unpleasant that I’ve basically given up on it, even though I live on the UES and often walk by. They also keep a lot of their stock offsite and unavailable in the store.
On the plus side, they were practically giving away 2007 Angerville in 2013.
Yes, that is a major annoyance. You can see something on the web site, they actually do have it, but it takes a day to get it to the store. (I drove to Zachy’s once for something last spring and discovered they, too, keep stuff offsite.)
At one point S&L had such an improbably deep list of old Bordeaux that I wondered if their web site was including Chateau & Estates’ inventory. I know some retailers have systems that tap distributors’ data bases and show things they can order.
But that couldn’t have been the the problem in Alan’s case, since he’d never have been buying Bordeaux.
Now that I know that Alan’s card was actually charged, then my opinion changes drastically. They have no business charging his card UNLESS they are making an actual sale. For example, if they in fact do NOT have the inventory to fill his order, they have no business charging his card.
If a retailer in fact has the practice of charging credit cards without bothering to check if they have (or can get) the inventory to fill the order, they deserve to be called out for that.
Bruce
Side note - does it cost a retailer and $ to refund money?
For example, I go into a store, charge $100 on my AMEX/VISA, then 2 days later return the item. The store has refunded me my $100 but do they get charged anything?
FYI - Not a fan of getting charged for something when somebody doesn’t have the product.
Charge or a hold? I don’t think I have ever been charged by anyone in a situation like this and I am pretty sure that I have been dinged by S-L before. In the burg game, pretty common I think. Lots more wine out there and it didn’t cost you any money.
I was…Hoyt Hill Village Wines in Nashville. Fun times. Did get my $ back after I contested charges via AMEX (who were great BTW).
Hold or Charge what is the difference. Why even put a hold on if you don’t have the product to sell in the first place?
I don’t understand, are you being ignored or are they helping the foreign tourist (interesting term) who is buying a lot of BDX and you want them to stop helping them and help you with favorably priced Burg?
George
They’d rather wait by the door for the next foreign guy to walk in than be occupied with you in the back of the store where the burgs are. Can’t say I begrudge them, given that I assume they’re paid on commission, but it means I’d rather not shop there if I can avoid it. No doubt my purchase of half a case of Angervile isn’t as sexy as the guy buying up seemingly all the Latour on hand, but that doesn’t mean I don’t grumble grumble when I’m buying a couple of hundred bucks of wine and they’re treating me like I asked for the Yellowtail.
They’re paid on commission? No wonder they ignore you, David.
If all wine salespeople were paid on commission, everybody on this board would get ignored!
I keed! I keed! hahahah
+1
Just roll with it. Silly first world problems . . . .