We truly believe that today suppliers need to be able to supply electronically invoices and catalogue files to their clients so saving their clients a considerable amount of time. That is why one of our points of difference in our retail software is just how good our importing supplier data is and it is so as we put that much effort into it.
However, as its electronic, it needs to be accurate as there is little if any manual checking as it is automatic. Today 10,000 plus items can go into a retail system, in seconds and there is little a retailer can do to check all the information. They can at best do spot checks. Yet they need to do these spot checks, which does waste time as some suppliers are not as accurate as many suppliers claim.
In an attempt to keep the files accurate, I often call the suppliers and complain on behalf of my clients and sometimes blast them on this blog. Yesterday a supplier who produces such imports put into an invoice two magazines Picture and People with same barcode. This was not the first time they have done this. As such if a person importing them was not careful; the computer could think that they were the same product and put one of the incoming magazines as the other product. So if, for example, 10 Picture and 10 People came in, the point of sale software could say that 20 Picture and zero People magazines came in or zero Picture and 20 People magazines came in. If the retailer, then sold it, the barcode could give with the wrong magazine at the point of sale, since the customer will almost always point out the lower price, it's the retailer who will lose. After that, their sales history would be wrong and their stock holding figures plus their invoices would not match the suppliers invoices make reconciliation difficult.
So I notified the supplier and was not happy with their response. Perhaps they are pretending not to know the problem which is quite possible as they asked basic questions but the information requested is readily available to anyone in the industry (in this case title tracker) or maybe they really do not know even elementary information about their products. In any case, I was disgusted with their handling of the issue and told them that.
What should be considered is, if suppliers can be penalising people for sending faulty sales history data, why should my clients not be able to charge suppliers for defective invoices being sent? This could easily cost them as there is a big difference in price between these magazines, and a few sales and returns could be $30 dollars lost on just one magazine.
