How We Trade
We monitor price and availability on something like one million electronic items and components although we only list about 82,000 items on this eCommerce web site.
We only hold a small selection of stocked products (mostly commonly required laser printer paper pickup rollers) at our main premises. These are usually despatched immediately to customers via Royal Mail or (for larger items) ParcelForce.
Other items are shipped direct by courier from our UK and European suppliers to our customers.
Each morning, for every product on our site, we compare the price and stock levels from all our suppliers. The price and availability on our website is then updated to reflect the best price we can source on that day (with a preference to in-stock items over back-ordered, so we can ship immediately where possible, even if it means sourcing from a supplier with a higher price).
Consequently the price and lead-times on our site reflect the best we can achieve. Where a product is only available for back-order, we clearly describe it as such.
Important: We rarely send out quote requests to our suppliers – we trade by automated processing of daily price/quantity stock feeds – margins are too tight for continual manual intervention to request a “better price” than that in the daily price list. If the item is not on the daily list, we are not going to phone/email to establish whether a supplier can source it.
What we require
To trade with a supplier we must have a regular daily list of product availability, including the supplier’s stock level and the supplier’s price to us.
We can receive the daily file by one of three routes, either:
- emailed to us every morning before 9:30am
- pulled from supplier’s FTP server
- uploaded to an account on our FTP server
As for the file content, it should typically be a CSV with at least:
- Manufacturer’s Part Code
- Distributor/Supplier’s Part Code (may be the same as above)
- Manufacturer/Brand
- Short Product Description (just a few words)
- Condition (New/Refurbished/Compatible/ExDemo/NewOpenBox/NewPull/TestedWorking)
- Stock Qty
- Price to us
We also need to know
The warranty duration, on
- New items – does it vary with manufacturer?
- Refurbished items
- Any exceptions (e.g. ex demo kit)
Carriage charges to
- UK mainland (any Scottish Highlands surcharge?)
Northern IrelandRepublic of Ireland- Isle of Man
- Isle of Wight
- Scottish Islands (including Shetland)
- Scilly Isles
- Guernsey
- Jersey
Any transaction surcharge for orders below a minimum order value?
The above assumes that we already have the product advertised on our eCommerce website. To add new products to the catalogue, in addition to the above we also require:
- GTIN (13-digit EAN or 12-digit UPC)
- Longer Description (ideally with any supporting PDF brochures)
- Product Category
- Image of the product that we can publish on our website
- Any Alternate Product Codes
