Hello,
I saw a number of things that I want are out of stock, but have backorder available, which got me thinking about something. How does Backorder work? I read the Customer Service page, but it didn’t seem to mention how Backorders are handled. Does Sparkfun:
A) make/get backordered items per order?
B) wait until a large enough of a request is made before getting/producing more?
C) have a priority list of what needs to be produced/stock’d?
D) other?
Cheers,
-robodude666
To answer your list:
A) Sort of…
B) Certainly not
C) Absolutely
Any time a product is out of stock we’re already working on getting more. We actually have tools that tell us when item stocks are approaching zero quantity and that’s when we begin ordering more. The process varies from item to item.
The process is similar for products produced by SparkFun. Build requests are added to our production schedule well before the item is out of stock. For all items our tools use historical sales data with a predictive algorithm to estimate how quickly an item will “burn up” so that we know to order more or begin a new production run well ahead of time. Unforeseeable spikes in popularity for some products increases the error in the algorithm and therefore can extend out-of-stock periods.
Unfortunately we only only have so many production resources available and we are sometimes at the mercy of suppliers around the world who may have slow turnaround times for necessary parts. We are, however, constantly working to improve our methods.