Dear John

[angrysoldier]

So trader rating's and number of post's should be used to determine one's honesty and integrity. How very liberal of you.[/QU




i agree

 

[RMXC51]

I like Marstar. My orders came through, the CFO screwed the second one up a little, not Marstar's fault. Fact is, they provide a service and bring in items other people don't. The place is made up of more people than John, why bash him on an internet forum because one of his employees didn't give you stellar service? How many of you get called names because somebody else at your place of business screwed up? Would you put up with that crap? There's better ways to handle the situation.

 

[johnny88]

I once had a job filling orders for a small pharmacutical company. It was a really great company with a great owner and product line. The only problem was I was young, the job was boring, so I couldn't stop thinking about pussy. The more I thought about it, the more orders I screwed up.

I think John should screen his employees more carefully as they seem to be responsible for much of the complaints. They need to stop thinking so much about pussy.

Had some great laughs reading posts on various threads. This one took the cake. After reading it ten times I was still LMFAO. God this was funny, maybe I am having a flash back and that’s why it’s so funny. Dunno, don’t care.

 

[jdman]

Not necessarily post count, but trader rating, definitely a major indication of how you conduct yourself. No such count....well then that says a lot too.

 

[RMXC51]

Bah, I'm 40, with a 1yr old and a wife with #2 in the oven and I still think about pussy all day long. I bet working with cool guns all day would help.

 

[nntw]

Not necessarily post count, but trader rating, definitely a major indication of how you conduct yourself. No such count....well then that says a lot too.

actually, I've 3 pleasant transactions that i posted +ve feedback with respect to the vendor, but it wasn't reciprocated. so, based on my experience, multiply +ve feedback x 2.5 to get actual transaction rating.

 

[jdman]

NNTW, keep buying it will go up.

 

[nntw]

i agree...but oddly, my wife keeps thinking there are other things for me to do with my (er...OUR) money!

 

[robin2y]

Hmmm,
I'll have to remind Hoff to reciprocate on evaluations then! Two transactions initiated before this thread are still pending so don't be surprised if it jumps to 4 or 5 in the coming days. If I was cynical, I'd create a bunch of fake handles and play with myself - suppose that it'd be almost as much be fun as interacting with others.
robin2y

Not necessarily post count, but trader rating, definitely a major indication of how you conduct yourself. No such count....well then that says a lot too.

 

[00Buck]

Marstar is very good.

Some people are just P-owned by their own tardness.

 

[Turf]

No complaints about Marstar from me either. Several deals in several years and not one screw up. For those that have or had legitimate complaints, sorry to hear it, but truth be told I guess it sucked to be you at the time.

 

[Griffoneur]

I once had a job filling orders for a small pharmacutical company. It was a really great company with a great owner and product line. The only problem was I was young, the job was boring, so I couldn't stop thinking about pussy. The more I thought about it, the more orders I screwed up.

I think John should screen his employees more carefully as they seem to be responsible for much of the complaints. They need to stop thinking so much about pussy.

mmmmmmm... pussy, I think I remember what that was like back in the day! I still think about it every now and then, but I don't remember what to do with it.

 

[Armourall]

I once had a job filling orders for a small pharmacutical company. It was a really great company with a great owner and product line. The only problem was I was young, the job was boring, so I couldn't stop thinking about pussy. The more I thought about it, the more orders I screwed up.

I think John should screen his employees more carefully as they seem to be responsible for much of the complaints. They need to stop thinking so much about pussy.

Pussy or Pusey???

 

[notbsd]

John,

NOTBSD:
"Then about 10 days later I got home to find a green crate with orange 1.4 explosives sticker sitting on my front porch, in plain view of entire street. "
And you blame Marstar for the stupidity of the carrier and/or delivery person ? How can you expect us to control them ?

I agree that majority of the blame is on the carrier. But I suspect that you'd too agree that a quick e-mail to a customer saying that "We got your order, we processed your CC and shipping out your order by COB today. Expect it in the next 3 or 4 business days" would go a long way towards improving communications.

"Great example is mil surp ammo. For how long 7.62x54r was out of stock? It's back in stock, but for about a year it was listed. 7.62x25 TT is out of stock. Why was it listed?
Yes that ammo ws out of stock, our fault... I apolagize for the foreign government who was slow issuing my contract, and even slower issuing my transit permits, and slower still issuing the export permits.... Obviously our fault....

John, my question to you is: Why are the items that are not in stock listed on the web site? Since they are marked as not in stock, obviously someone went and updated the necessary page. Why not erase the entry outright? If you only have blanks and 7.62x39 ammo, why not just list those?

"But reality is that having a computer system that tracks availability in real time is not that complicated."
I would welcome your suggestions to remedy the situation, I would pay you well for your services....

If you are serious about your offer, we should talk. I no-longer do this stuff for a living, but I did it for about 5 years

Just to give you a bit of an idea of what's involved, generally I'd start by trying to understand my customer's business process first (ie, what kind of record keeping is necessary? How is the process of a sale is handled? Is the process the same for all items, or are some items need to be handled differently from others? (In your case, yes, since firearms are handled through CFC, and have different classifications, and CFC can abort the transaction, ammo requires PAL, and other items are just sold without any additional paperwork, so at least half a dozen different business processes) What areas need to be improved? Is updating the website necessary? Does an e-mail need to go out at every step of the transaction? (In your case probably yes to both).

Then I'd get the customer to identify what needs to be improved, and provide some suggestions of my own.

Then based on the identified business processes, a software would get customized so that it follows the business steps that were identified (broadly speaking, all items in inventory get process labels, say, "open sale", "pal required", "non-restricted", "restricted", "prohib 12.6", "prohib 12.2", "special order", etc that are used to identify what business process is followed, and type labels, such as "ammo", "handgun", "rifle", "accessory", etc. Other labels will be added as needed).

Then I'd spend some time on customer's site fine-tuning the business process to meet the actual requirements, often implementing changes in real time.

The hardest part in converting a brick and mortar store (I've dealt primarily with stores dealing in computer equipment that had 1000s of items in the inventory) where all the paperwork is kept on paper or in some simple database to a new format is merchandising - populating the system with correct data.

At this stage you can also add additional information , such as location of the items in the warehouse, description of the items and reference to the images of the items for the web site.

Edit: re-read what I posted, and noticed that it's not apparently obvious why I am talking about point of sales in the same context as the web site. What I talking about is enterprise resource planning/business intelligence, where POS, and web site are just elements.

The inventory database is what's driving everything. Website queries it to generate the web pages for the web page, as well as POS system queries it for sales. So if you added 5 rifles to the database, web site shows that there are 5 available, and a customer can only add 5 of them to their shopping cart. If you sell an item, quantity of them in the database decreases, thus web site shows the decreased quantity on hand.

Thus the entire things unfortunately has to be pretty tightly integrated (which is where I was making my money), since you need the customer database, the e-mail system with tickets and order confirmation (customer database and e-mail system are broadly known as CRM - customer relationship management), the point of sale software, inventory management software and the web site all exchange data with each other. And all of them need to work with the way you do things.

It's not a trivial problem, but there are at least a few highly customizable open source or even commercial off the shelf solutions freely available , that do the inventory/sales/web site, and are customizable enough to suit. (I'd start by looking at what openbravo and osCommerce offer, and see if they can be customized to meet the business process requirements. If not, then start looking at COTS)

It also doesn't hurt to see what other people in the same market space do.
Good example of something that works is an American site luckygunner. Real time inventory levels are shown, e-mail confirmations, shopping cart, etc. Life is a little bit simpler for them, since they only deal with maybe 100 different types of inventory, and business processes are fewer, but still, this is something to learn from.

""We got your question, your ticket # is so and so, we will follow up on it shortly" AND THEN FOLLOW UP ON IT)."
As I have noted many times, most e mail messages are replied within 24-48 hours IF we get them.... Our traffic runs between 300-800 messages a day.
However some e mail messages are complex and require specific research either in the parts section or special orders.... ie; a special order rifle from Italy, with set triggers, special wood, engraving etc, etc, and I need a reply in two days.... ?

Well, one way to let customers know that you got their inquery is to reply back saying "Yes, we got your e-mail, your ticket number is 1234, we will follow up in two business days with an update". And then get back to a customer within 2 days saying "Yeah, this is special order, it will take us 2 weeks to find out if we can get what you want, are you still interested?" . If customer replies back with "yes", reply back with "We will get back to you in 2 weeks" and actually follow back with either "We are still looking" or "This will cost you 9999$ dollars, if you are still interested, please provide 25% deposit".

If customer calls, you could ask them "Do you have a ticket number?" and follow up from there.

Heck, you know your business processes, problem is that as your customer I'd feel very frustrated when I send you an e-mail, and as far as I perceive it nothing happens. If things take place in the background, let me know, so I don't have any doubts whether you received my e-mail or my payment.

"I suspect that following up on and implementing just one of these suggestions would both increase sales and lower John's frustration levels..... "
I could not agree more, hiring a second John would be nice, if you find one let me know he would be a welcome addition to the already large Marstar family

*sigh* John.... I don't know what to reply to this. Based on the forums communications you come across as a person who wants to be in charge of everything, and always in control. I understand that, and I understand the motivation behind it. But with proper checks and controls you likely could trust someone else to take care of some things that you do. Like communication on the forums, for example.

I am not taking issue with you but simply saying that yes there are problems, but in a very unique industry like ours one has to deal with some heavy bureaucracy both here and off shore, paperwork is a constant nightmare, but bear with us, some day we might acheive the level of perfection demamnded of us

Regards
John

John,
notice that I am trying to be constructive. Problem with being constructive is that without knowing how your business operates it's very hard to suggest specific steps to remedy the situation. Simple things like whether you have your computer systems/web site/email system hosted somewhere off site, or if you have an internet connection, a router and 3 computers in the corner of your office, that you fully control change quite a bit. I have no idea what software you use now, what you use for inventory tracking, heck, how computer literate you are.... And all of those variables change quite a bit as to what I can suggest.

If I tell you, for example, that "a few procmail scripts and Apache with roundup as a frontend to mysql will solve your e-mail tracking issues", and it turns out that you use Outlook on the desktop and hosted Exchange server hosted in US, then how useful is my suggestion?

Frankly, I am sure that there are people closer to Vankleek Hill then me that have the proper skill set, that you can tap for expertise, as long as you have a will to do so. People with whom you'd be able to have a NDA/non-compete, for instance.

 

[MustangFrank]

Bah, I'm 40, with a 1yr old and a wife with #2 in the oven and I still think about pussy all day long. I bet working with cool guns all day would help.

Holly crap. I had to read your post a couple times to realize you do not have a 1yr old wife. My eyes are going. You know why. Also, immediately take the #2 out of the oven. You can keep it in the freezer, or you can dry it if it has interesting bones in it, but never put it in the oven. That's just weird.

 

[Gefreiter]

You couldn't be any vaguer Gefreiter. There are two sides to every story and before jumping to conclusions we need all the details from both sides.
Was it Special Order? Did you Break It from Negligence? Buyers Remorse?
Maybe it was a Tiger Tank and the Shipping was high both ways?
If you post something make it meaningful and truthful, otherwise it really doesn't mean alot or carry any weight.

A) I don't believe CGN is the the right place to expose the details of the misdoings of your precious dealer, even more so since the transaction was not done through CGN Exchange Forum.

B) If one needs to go public on an issue with a vendor to resolve it, it's time to find another source, IMHO.

Had I wanted to expose the details of my sour deal to a third party for an neutral opinion, I could have gone to the small claims court. Just more cost, time and frustration. As I didn't even get a reply from your dear John in person, after explaining to him in writing the details of the transaction that were improper & unacceptable and where I felt he had gone short on his word, I chose the only remaining (and reasonable) option: go play somewhere else.

Judging by the size of the font and content of your first reply at the beginning of this thread, you don't seem to be very neutral your self in this discussion, nor interested to learn something here. Attack is said to be the better form of defence. Who is it or what is it you are defending here? If your fear is to see a dealer with cool stuff sink, perhaps you should meditate on the "survival of the fittest" concept: In business, the survivors are the ones who make sure their customers are treated fairly and walk away satisfied.

It's called democracy, Coyote Ugly: everyone is entitled to cast his vote. Browsing through this thread, doesn't look like I'm the only nay sayer.

I'm done on this subject, unless John who probably remembers exactly who I am ("high end collectible" K43...), drops me a line at my personal e-mail. If I'm ever refunded my money, you can be sure I will report it here. Dream, dream, dream ...

 

[Coyote Ugly]

It's reality. There are many stores that have restocking fees. Just look online. Sometimes 15%.
Same goes with Car Parts for Restoration.
LMC Truck has a 20% Restocking Fee for quarter panels, fenders, doors and all it's parts.
Time is money. No one works for free.

Same with shipping, a high end rifle over 5K with signature and insurance can eat a $100 bill fast just one way (maybe more) with Canada Post. Another reality.

I write BIG for those with hangovers. It really wakes them up so they smell the Coffee!

 

[.30/06 FTW]

It's reality. There are many stores that have restocking fees. Just look online. Sometimes 15%.
Same goes with Car Parts for Restoration.
LMC Truck has a 20% Restocking Fee for quarter panels, fenders, doors and all it's parts.
Time is money. No one works for free.

Same with shipping, a high end rifle over 5K with signature and insurance can eat a $100 bill fast just one way (maybe more) with Canada Post. Another reality.

I write BIG for the visually impared and those with hangovers.

If they're visually impaired then they probably have already have their screen zoomed in so they can see.

 

[Baal]

I write BIG for those with hangovers. It really wakes them up so they smell the Coffee!

We should be allowed to leave negative feedback to people who use this font size. At least it's not blood red and flashing like a strobe light too.

 

[polaris]

don't worry, John will be here soon enough to straighten you out,
All of you...