Tyre Kickers

People who say they want to buy but don't really!

[Extracold]

Tyre kickers. Arrgh! We are a small company, first year of trading, providing a package for people consisting of a couple of elements. Part of (a key part) is a local commodity that we resell. As we are still starting up we don't feel able to make commitments to purchase these commodoties in advance - not because we're unwilling but we simply havent got sufficient historic stats in yet to fully understand seasonal impacts. And we can't get them on "sale or return" terms as the local market pretty well takes all it can get its hands on anyway.

We therefore rely on a business process which kind of runs like: Customer submits form on our web site to check availability / we check & reserve for 24 hrs / we confirm stock back to customer and supply pre-filled order / customer returns order & pays deposit.

This is kind of clunky, but every so often we get a swarm of tyre kickers - and it winds up with us having to run around reserving then cancelling stuff all over the place.

Anyone got any good ideas on how to either:
Pre qualify them before we reserve the items (without being too blatent on the web form!)
Improve the business process

[King_Fisher]

If your supplier has enough stock, why reserve it? Just check to see if he
has ample stock. Or set up an automated reserve cancellation program which
would automatically email supplier within a set amount of time (24 or 36 hrs}
and cancels the reserve out Or tell the supplier to cancel any reserve out
that was over a certain time frame and let them handle it. Don't enough about
your business model to advise you any better than that. Hopes this helps! KF

[JohnRoy]

How about adding one more item in the process:

fill form on our web site to check availability /
we check [supply /
send customer a preliminary notice that supply is available - get customer to reply and confirm and then/
reserve for 24 hrs /
we confirm stock back to customer and supply pre-filled order