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Tuesday 10 March 2009

High Discount Offers

5 comments:

Geoff said...

Thank you for these offers. However, can I say that items are still coming through with Zondervan pre-prices on them and invoiced at a higher rate. In this offer all the purpose driven Life books were pre priced at £7.99. Other Zondervan items on the invoice were also wrong. We are also getting wrong discounts applied for the World Book Day offers.

GLO Bookshop said...

What is particularly concerning is that these problems are not being properly sorted- as far as I can see. Each 'pre-price' issue we have is reported via email, with the relevant invoice numbers, ISBN detail & specific pricing problem with the offending item. And the same item was reported last week, and this week, and will probably appear the week after until someone in authority takes that information and changes the stock record- for the benefit of everyone in the trade.

And, yes, you're right- I am a pedantic, penny-pinching miserable manager, sitting, Scrooge-like, taking perverse pleasure in claiming & chasing every last little precious penny......

So I accept that I am probably a bit obsessive about this issue! However, that is (in part) being driven by the length of time it is taking to get this problem sorted out. My delivery yesterday had six Zondervan items requiring claimed. Time to put the lid on this one, please, Zondervan and STL!

Surely you must be able to tell when the offending 'prepriced' items clear through the warehouse from production/delivery records. Or why can't someone 'walk the shelves', identify the Zondervan products, note the offending items & quantity in stock, and get the price corrected on your system. Then monitor the sales movement of the prepriced items until they sell through. Then correct the system price to reflect the current reality. A lot of work, perhaps, but maybe something that Zondervan should put some resource into. After all, it's their problem- they 'gambled' on the dollar/pound price staying stable...

UnicorntreebooksBoss said...

Glo,
I don't think you are being pedantic at all!
take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves as my old mum likes to say!
I am getting fed up of wrong discounts on promotion, mispriced books and waiting responses and credit notes!
Add to that given that 3 days after the current Select promotion started we recieve an email from Richard McChesney saying oops we made a boob and the £13.99 GNB's are really £15.99 and that's what we will be charging etc then I can't see how it can be wrong of us to so judiciously police the STL invoices and errors - like you say perhaps if they did it first we wouldn't need to!
I have to say that this current issue with up pricing things is getting very tedious, and up pricing something in promotional literature (which hasn't been up-priced by the publisher as £15.99 has been the price of the GNB Sun & Rain for a while now!)really isn't on at all.
Don't know about you but the time and inconvenience this is causing is wearing thin indeed.
Please STL Guys we know you are harrased and working at fixing it but get the job done before this kills all of us!

John Duncan said...

Count me in as a a 'pedantic, penny-pinching miserable manager, sitting, Scrooge-like, taking perverse pleasure in claiming & chasing every last little precious penny' ...... what with internet competition, rising prices of U.S books, hours spent poring over STL invoices, the credit crunch, rocketing utility bills, appalling weather conditions keeping customers at home and a host of other factors, it seems to me to be pretty much part of the job description these days.

Trust Media Blog Team said...

Hi All

Since this issue was first raised, we have been in deep conversation with Zondervan on how best to solve this issue. Zondervan have now come back kindly and a solution has been agreed. As I’m sure you can appreciate, due to the worsening dollar exchange rate, we are not able to simply drop our prices.

During the next few weeks we will endeavour to sticker all our Zondervan stock holding in Carlisle with barcode stickers that will cover the UK price. This will begin with the top 100 titles and then we will work our way down the list. Again I’m sure you can appreciate that this is no small task. We have a huge number of Zondervan titles in our warehouse and this will take time to do.

I am aware of comments made about previous stickers used being too peelable, so we are working with our print company to ensure stronger glue is used.

Can I ask that you continue to bear with us for just a short period of time whilst we sticker our stock. Zondervan have agreed to sticker their stock holding in the US before being sent to the UK. I apologise for the inconvenience this has been causing you, I’m sure it’s the last thing you need at this time. But I am confident that we will have solved the issue in the near future.

Kind Regards

STL Blog Team