Date:         Fri, 7 Dec 2001 19:19:50 -0500
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: Bus Depot Sale
In-Reply-To:  <1BED6AE4CC61B74983C7B74E170D4AAE1F8795@Lee.Advance.ColoState.EDU>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

> Just curious about the Bus Depot Triple-Discount sale? Did many people
> order? Think there will be another sale?


Well, I can say that in terms of sales volume, the response was tremendous -
nearly twice what I had expected. In fact a couple of people said that they
had trouble getting through by phone. For most of them, either persistence
or using the website paid off.  For any who did not get through, I
apologize; we took the calls as quickly as we could, but suddenly found
ourselves handling the sales volume we get during a peak summer day, with a
smaller off-season staff on hand. Hopefully I'll be able to do this again,
so that anyone who missed out can get another chance. That will of course
depend on whether we made any money. It will take a little while to gauge
that.  I would like to do it again one way or the other. Worst case, if we
lost money at a triple discount, I could always do a double discount or
something. But if we made out alright I'd like to do it again the same as
last time.

With regard to someone's complaint that the sale only applied to items in
stock, actually this is not completely correct. If the part was out of
stock, but could quickly be replenished, I accepted the order for that part.
That includes about 5000 items that we can quickly get from distributors who
ship to us daily. What I could not accept was orders for parts that could
NOT be replenished by the time the order shipped. This would have forced me
to backorder those parts and ship them separately. Every time we backorder
an item, we lose money, because we ship each backordered part without
charging additional shipping.  So if I backorder a $10 part, and then ship
it separately at a cost of $2 postage, the postage expense kills my profit
on that part (plus I have to pay someone to pack and ship it, so I actually
lose a little money). If I did that PLUS sold the part at 15% off, I'd lose
more money than I could afford to. I know some of you would rather that
there were no rules or limitations on the triple-discount deal, but if I
didn't impose certain limitations that prevented it from becoming a
financial blood-bath for the Bus Depot, I couldn't have done it at all.

Anyway, I thank all of you for your tremendous response, and hope to be able
to do it again.  I'll definately keep you posted.

- Ron Salmon
  The Bus Depot, Inc.
  (215) 234-VWVW
  www.busdepot.com

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