Since your new site seems to be unusually slow, please allow us to place an order on the 1st available menu (submenu) for an item. For example: if I click on Wireless → Modules you list all available wireless modules. Put an order button for each item on this page for that does not have further options so that we don’t have to go another level deeper, waiting for that page to load. Friday it took me about 20 minutes to place an order for 6 different items.
Since you apparently don’t have real-time inventory integrated into all of your web cataloged items (i.e. +/- 1.2g ADXL E8 breakout board, I can still put it in my shopping cart with no indication that it’s backordered or that it will hold up shipment of addition items), please, in the ordering process, have a check box for approval of shipping of partial orders (since your policy, as I found out hours after thinking my order was being processed, is to “hold orders with back ordered items until we can ship a complete order”). Incedently, by the time I was able to respond to your e-mail notification of your policy, it was too late to ship my 2nd-Day order that day.
I realize you are experiencing growing pains and I am excited to have discovered your site, but I’d hate to see a great experimenter/inventor site like this disappear because of order/delivery frustration. You are providing access to a bunch of devices that we’d never get to play with unless we committed to buying 10,000 units. I have items on a “wish list” from almost every product catagory on your site and I just want to make sure you’re around for me to buy each as funding comes available.
The only thing that I have a problem with is the non-real-time out of stock notice. I ordered a small perf board with a couple other parts and 2 days later I was notified it was out of stock. There has got be be a way in software that you can enter the amount you have in stock and when the stocks gone poooof the out of stock text appers.
OT:when do you think you will be getting the small perf. boards back. They weren’t my main priority and now thier holding up my order. I ordered Jan. 30.
The load times have been a bit dissapointing with the new website but the addtional info and new easier to navigate layout (I hope) makes up for it. We are moving everything to a beefier server to try to improve things as well. I look forward to the day we need two servers :!:
Putting an ‘Add to Cart’ button on the item preview pages is a decent idea, but the underlying problem is really the load times. If the user can simply bring up the item and purchase it, a second Add to Cart button is just extra. We should really be working to fix the load times instead.
When a stock quantity hits 0, the customer cannot add the item to their cart. This bothers me on a few levels. I understand your frustration as a customer, but at the same time, I don’t want to limit what you can purchase by any means! We have to inspect each order for fraud, inventory, and order address quality. Most orders are processed in 24 hours. Shipping same day is very difficult, but we are getting closer.
Battling stock quantities is always a problem. I will give more power to Grant and Eric to be able to manipulate the stock numbers on the fly which should minimize the number of backorder notifications. My worst nightmare is something gets left at 0 when we really do have stock.
It’s not a big issue and maybe it is just me, but it seems a little hard to get used that the price of an item is mentioned at the top of the description and not near the ‘Add to Cart’ button.
This is an idea mostly for batchpcb, but also applicable to sparkfun orders in general.
Is there a shipping tracking options? I dunno if USPS does it, but being able to tell where the package is heading to and a good ETA given by the the shipping company would be nice.
Also along the same idea with batchpcb, maybe post a roster of which orders made it onto a panel and are in transit between here and China? For example:
Panel # XXXX
Submitted: XX/XX/XXXX Expected Return: XX/XX/XXXX
Order#.Quantity
XXXX.X
XXXX.X
XXXX.X
XXXX.X …
This maybe a lot of extra work, since I don’t know how much can be automated. Although this would give a good checklist to see what PCBs, and of what quanity, were actually were produced by GP, and corrective actions taken from there. It could be compiled during each panalization (as part of a larger spreadsheet or whatever you guys have now to track this stuff), and just this portion displayed in some way (as a log-in only, publicly on the batchpcb site, or as admin post only fourm topic). This could be an enhancement to the current order tracking system on batchpcb.
I dunno how practical this is. Its just a thought.
USPS has delivery confirmation for Priority mail ($4), no real tracking capabilities. Express mail ($14) does have tracking, but it’s an over night service anyway. Most customers choose to get their PCBs shipped First Class Mail which can take a variable length of time with no tracking or confirmation.
The roster is a pretty good idea, but I think the info will be eclipsed by the order tracking window. You should be able to view the status of your order at any time. Adding the panel # is good. Expected Return Date is only going to cause us to get a flood of emails from customers when the panel is 48 hours late
