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Oversold stock, how is this possible?

Associate
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England
OP isn't wrong, but the tone is a bit petulant and reeks of Dunning Kruger. There are robust systems that can prevent this, however, it is non-trivial to have a lot of sales & website queries asynchronously arriving and processing them such that you don't get some errors. Keep in mind this is a distributed system, involving multiple parties.

I would bet a large sum of money not a single person in this thread could manage such a task.

In saying this, I believe there are solutions, it just takes investment of time and money. Cost vs. benefit to OCUK, probably high at the moment with ridiculous loads on the website, but usually very low.
There's also the fact that those systems may not be needed again for a long time after this demand dies down, depending on how things go in the industry.
 
Associate
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It is actually very expensive and difficult to upgrade a stock system, this is the reason why so many government departments are still using windows xp.
And improving it by 20 mins or so will not make big difference to ocuk revenue, thats why it will not be their priority.
 
Associate
OP
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OP isn't wrong, but the tone is a bit petulant and reeks of Dunning Kruger.

Hey, no need to insult.. I have posted again stating that makes sense as a software engineer myself, I do understand....
Futhermore, I did also state "Yes, I am a little salty".
I'm really not sure why you felt it necessary to comment in such a bad tone toward me personally?
 
Associate
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11 Mar 2008
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The other possibility to consider is that if a supplier tells them that they will receive 20 of product that day, they may be updating the site with that information... however when the stock arrives, the count may be off, or there may have been some damage that makes some of the items unsellable.
 
Soldato
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The TARDIS, Wakefield, UK
I dont think it was as much as 15-20 minutes but it has been well known for 3-4 years this system update has been in the pipeline its been mentioned every so often. Plus I am pretty sure they also said there is a new forum coming too as part of the new system.
Problem was getting something like ,000's of orders for the same line in a space of 1-2 minutes when they had say 100 in stock the poor old system could not react in time to say everyone above 100 was too late it was out of stock. Not just OCUK either the FE seller had oversold issues too plus the payment system which is a third party broke down to a snails pace a few times payment authorisation was taking hours instead of minutes. Unprecedented times have shown up the frailties in many e-tailers systems.
 
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So recently, I sucked it up and went for a 6800XT which "had stock left" according to the website.
2 days later, I receive an email saying that it was over sold and either had to be changed to another item or refunded.

How does stock get oversold? If you got 50, you put 50 online. It doesn't make sense.

Furthermore, I was told that I could switch to another brand which wasn't displayed online which I declined as I wanted to think about it. Later calling back to take them up on that offer but was told no there wasn't any stock and only what is online is what is available.

I like overclockers and have done since I was a kid.. What is happening here? Yes, I am a little salty, both at prices (not OCs fault) and oversold stock..

Hidden stock? Were there any 3080s or 3070s? What are you going to do with the purchase?Did you get another card?
 
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Soldato
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Sounds like the website is old school and not made for modern e commerce

gibbo may need to sell one of his Ferrari's so he can build a proper website
 
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:cry: Surely, it was just a mistake, maybe someone entered more stock into the website than there was inside their warehouse. So more people bought the item even though there was not enough stock. Simple mistake.
 
Soldato
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7,750
Occurs across all items ordered something like some cables that said they were in stock when it turned out they weren't the system is a bit optimistic when it gets down to single figures

The cynic in me would say it might be nice for a bank account to have a influx of tens or hundreds of thousand of pound for a week or two earning a small percentage of interest albeit very small these days.

Pretty sure its been stated elsewhere that any kind of business transaction costs money to take it and costs again to refund it more than any fraction of % interest earned which as any savings account will tell you is virtually nothing these days which is why they prefer you wait for stock to come in if oversold
 
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Sounds like the website is old school and not made for modern e commerce

gibbo may need to sell one of his Ferrari's so he can build a proper website
As you very well know it's in the process of being updated :)

Mind, the world's biggest e-tailer experienced "technical issues" on the 3080 launch day :D
 
Associate
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Hey, no need to insult.. I have posted again stating that makes sense as a software engineer myself, I do understand....
Futhermore, I did also state "Yes, I am a little salty".
I'm really not sure why you felt it necessary to comment in such a bad tone toward me personally?

Sorry then buddy. There have been a lot of entitled posts on the forums recently and it has changed how I read posts...

Its a PITA, but really, no harm done. Proper problems of the first world.
 
OcUK Staff
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So recently, I sucked it up and went for a 6800XT which "had stock left" according to the website.
2 days later, I receive an email saying that it was over sold and either had to be changed to another item or refunded.

How does stock get oversold? If you got 50, you put 50 online. It doesn't make sense.

Furthermore, I was told that I could switch to another brand which wasn't displayed online which I declined as I wanted to think about it. Later calling back to take them up on that offer but was told no there wasn't any stock and only what is online is what is available.

I like overclockers and have done since I was a kid.. What is happening here? Yes, I am a little salty, both at prices (not OCs fault) and oversold stock..

Hi there

Can you drop me a reply with your order number please.

I suspect it was the Gigabyte card you ordered we had around 70-80 in stock and they were selling steadily for a couple of days and then sales went crazy in a really small time window and no doubt you placed your order in that window and the website could not keep up.

Drop me your order number here and I’ll also PM you as we do have other brand 6800 XT in stock that I can sort you out with and I apologise as to why a sales person said they could also do this but then changed their minds.
 
Soldato
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30 Jan 2007
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PA, USA (Orig UK)
It is incredibly expensive to maintain accurate stock figures on a website when you run massive databases/datasets/ldaps etc etc.

I used to work for a retailer/etailer that had price changes in products, and stock levels that changed by the minute. Now take a product that has say 5 sizes with multiple color or other options and that becomes really expensive/slow to update hundreds of rows for one product depending on how your code is setup. It also depends on your source of truth for data which can be different to what is being used to display stock figures.

Don't even get me started on JMS messages and how much of a PITA that system can be.

TL;DR: multiple layers of data that assist in search/stock levels can cause this to happen plus other technical issues.
 
OcUK Systems
OcUK Staff
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16 Nov 2007
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2,986
Location
Stoke-on-Trent
So recently, I sucked it up and went for a 6800XT which "had stock left" according to the website.
2 days later, I receive an email saying that it was over sold and either had to be changed to another item or refunded.

How does stock get oversold? If you got 50, you put 50 online. It doesn't make sense.

Furthermore, I was told that I could switch to another brand which wasn't displayed online which I declined as I wanted to think about it. Later calling back to take them up on that offer but was told no there wasn't any stock and only what is online is what is available.

I like overclockers and have done since I was a kid.. What is happening here? Yes, I am a little salty, both at prices (not OCs fault) and oversold stock..

I'm sorry you experienced this, we are working to introduce a new website and new internal systems designed at preventing this in future. The situation is a lot more complex that you appear to believe, which is why we've got graphics cards in stock which we are completely unable to list online at the moment. When we accidentally enabled a stock feed on the website a few weeks ago, hundreds of auto buy bots processed over 800 orders in a matter of minutes, before any real customer would have even seen cards in stock.

They also need to stop taking money before despatch.
Funny how at our work which definitely requires a more complicated system we had a Sage system up and running in about 2 months.
You've got absolutely no idea how complex our systems need to be. As it happens, we are implementing a new Sage based system ourselves and even paying for them to "put a rush on" we are most of the way through a near two year process. No off the shelf solution was suitable. Just because your business is simple, it doesn't mean that everybody else's is.

Our current website was mostly off the shelf, just a few years ago and it's that which is causing all of the oversell issues. Ironically, our internal systems which are ancient in comparison, do everything real-time

The cynic in me would say it might be nice for a bank account to have a influx of tens or hundreds of thousand of pound for a week or two earning a small percentage of interest albeit very small these days.
you know that business accounts don't really pay interest at the moment? right? Essentially we pay them for the service. Also, when we process a payment they take about a 3% fee, so, with refunds factored it it's actually a lot cheaper for us NOT to take payment up front, but we do it because a decent percentage of payment attempts don't go through, for one reason for another and the last thing you'd want after waiting nine months for a graphics card is for somebody else to get it because your payment was declined.
 
Soldato
Joined
9 Apr 2007
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13,579
You've got absolutely no idea how complex our systems need to be. As it happens, we are implementing a new Sage based system ourselves and even paying for them to "put a rush on" we are most of the way through a near two year process. No off the shelf solution was suitable. Just because your business is simple, it doesn't mean that everybody else's is.

Ours isn't off the shelf either, ours handles multiple levels of stock inventory from raw materials, production stock, repairs stock, different levels of build, then it's split into commercial and military.
You then also have all our manufacturing drawings, BOMs, software control each with multiple versions and customer specific control.
You have manufacturing route cards within Sage also. Everything down to each screw and resistor is tracked and traceable for 10+ years.
Different customers pay different prices have wildly different terms and conditions all tracked and traced.

Yeah I don't know your system but from a simplistic view you buy and sell products.
We buy raw materials, manufacture, some items get part completed by a sub contractor then have to come back, be certified and start at the beginning again, we sell all over the world with different certification in each area.
We then do repairs on top.

I imagine it would be as if OCUK also manufactured everything they sell, from the absolute ground up, also repaired everything, dealt with obsolescence were contracted to support everything for 10 years, no parming warranty off on another manufacturer. Imagine if you sold a 3080 you'd have to still be able to make and sell that in 10 years.

So yeah I'm going out on a limb and saying it's a lot simpler.
 
OcUK Systems
OcUK Staff
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16 Nov 2007
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Location
Stoke-on-Trent
Ours isn't off the shelf either, ours handles multiple levels of stock inventory from raw materials, production stock, repairs stock, different levels of build, then it's split into commercial and military.
You then also have all our manufacturing drawings, BOMs, software control each with multiple versions and customer specific control.
You have manufacturing route cards within Sage also. Everything down to each screw and resistor is tracked and traceable for 10+ years.
Different customers pay different prices have wildly different terms and conditions all tracked and traced.
That's all pretty simple with Sage X3 though, it's exactly what it was designed for.

Yeah I don't know your system but from a simplistic view you buy and sell products.
We buy raw materials, manufacture, some items get part completed by a sub contractor then have to come back, be certified and start at the beginning again, we sell all over the world with different certification in each area.
We then do repairs on top.
We do all of that and more. We manufacture with a mix of raw materials, off the shelf products and subcontracted parts. We have to hold data on nearly 100,000 live products including spec, product data, country of origin commodity codes, serial numbers etc. Millions of units of stock, all of which need tracking and stock level verification processes. Historical data for around a million products. We need pricing, both current and historical, full tracing for every unit so we know which supplier we got it from, when and how much we paid. We've got to handle data for millions of customers and over a hundred suppliers, both retail and corporate, accounts and payment history etc. Multiple price lists, both in & out and stock feeds both in & out.
We've got hundreds of multi-level, complex BOMs, many of which are online for customers to configure.
We've got to manage and monitor the movement of tens of thousands of units of stock daily so that the right product ends up at the right customer, and then there's the returns process, tracking returned products through the testing, return and replacement process, logging everything along every step so that the supplier/manufacturer knows exactly what was wrong with the product and the customer gets exactly the right replacement.

We're not just a reseller, we are a distributor, a system integrator and a service provider. Sage X3 is designed from the ground up for manufacturers such as yourselves, two months is definitely an off the shelf implementation. The work that Sage are doing to build a system which can allow our PC system configurators to work as they do now is eight months down and still counting.
 
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Soldato
Joined
26 Aug 2013
Posts
8,393
When I came across this forum, I was expecting a few "My system is better than your system" debates. This one is a surprise, however...

:)

On a serious note - It's good to hear input from both OcUK staff and others. Very informative and helps understand the obstacles faced.
 
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