15 Jan Adventures in Warehousing
Page 91 in our Quickship catalog features 62 different sizes of annular cutters. These are specialty cutting devices that make precision holes in metal. The most expensive one is $288.96, and there are 12 others that sell for more than $100.
It’s a great product for the folks who use such things, but some sizes are much more popular than other sizes. It used to present a dilemma when we put together our Quickship catalog. Nobody would expect us to inventory a 1-3/16″ x 3″ cutter that sells for $121.91 if we only get an order for that size once every three years. Yet we hated the idea of using an asterisk to explain that these few items, unlike everything else in the catalog, were not covered by our same day shipping guarantee.
So a couple of years ago, we decided to go ahead and stock all the sizes that we have listed in our Quickship so we could truly say that every item in our Quickship catalog was guaranteed in-stock and ready to ship the same day.
Every time someone claims our same day guarantee, it costs HUB $100. The cost of that program is pretty small compared to what it costs to inventory every single item in our catalog when ″common sense″ would dictate that the slower moving, higher dollar items be sold on special order only. But the value of being able to promise every single item in the catalog will ship on the same day is what makes HUB the kind of place you can rely on. And that makes it worth it to us.
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