The Order Narrative (Tradecraft)

This is a nuts and bolts article about understanding where a product stands at any given moment. Before an order is placed, even while talking with a customer, I like to run down this flow chart so I have an idea of product availability. I have it in my head, but it's worth printing out until you get it down:

The flow chart may seem complicated, but once you do it a few times, it's quick enough to perform while speaking with a customer. All my sales associates should be able to do this for every item we sell. Where we get hung up though, is information at distribution. The part of the flow chart where it says "tell them it's not available and why" is often a bit of guesswork. If you don't know, tell them you don't know, but there should be a product narrative available from distributors.

This starts with product codes. When I look up an item in a distributors system, it's more than likely by product code, especially if their keyword search is janky. One of my pet peeves is the seemingly arbitrary changing of these codes.

*Often, code changes are manufacturer driven... There are other reasons that codes get changed. But at least in our case, the majority of the time it is either dictated by the manufacturer or done to move to "code synergy" in the industry. One example of manufacturer-driven: Warlord is switching their codes from the long mostly alpha codes to very long mostly numeric codes. Liana Loos-Austin at E-Figures.

GTS has their own codes for a lot of products, especially Ultra Pro, but the standardized code is searchable on their order site. For example, Top Loaders is inexplicably UPTLX at GTS, but I don't care because the description includes the standard Ultra Pro code of 81579. This is smart. Usually when a code is changed, the item is difficult to find. It would be helpful if other distributors kept old codes searchable (Alliance does this sometimes).

Getting back to product narrative, I need a story when a product is no longer available. I need to know why. Some distributors just delete products from view if they're sold out and not expected to return. Others don't add pre-order items to systems until fairly late in the release schedule. This breaks my narrative and results in often not ordering from these distributors. This is because my staff uses the system with the best narrative for pre orders and special orders, which can sometimes lock in that sale to that distributor. The best story teller gets my business.

Alliance tends to be the best story teller. They recently added "X" marks for items no longer carried in a particular warehouse, either because it's discontinued or just not coming. This extra bit of nuance confused some retailers, but it added to the product narrative. I won't be waiting any longer for the "X" product, so I know to order it from another warehouse, another distributor, or give up on it.

Any other status indicators is also helpful: Limited, Discontinued, Pre Order. The goal here is to provide retailers good information to make us informed customers who can help our own clients. I am assuming all this information is true and accurate. This has come a long way in the last decade, where there used to be a lot of disinformation, laziness and accusations of outright deceit regarding information from sales reps. More than likely, they were just as clueless as us and trying to create their own narratives.