[dba-SQLServer] TicketMaster-like Timer

Mark Breen marklbreen at gmail.com
Mon Dec 20 07:28:42 CST 2004


Hello Andy,

I hear what you are saying but....

1) If you delay long enough on an Airline site, do you believe that
you will retain the seat
2) If you delay long enough on a Dell site, do you really think that
the PC is being 'held' for you.

The reality is that you either disappoint many customers by having the
stock all tied up with enquiries or people that do not have the
ability to pay for it, versus, once in a blue moon, you have to
display a message that "this product has just gone out of stock, but
we would now like to offer you this as an alternative", depending on
the scenario, you could even offer it as a free upgrade.

I accept we are only talking in general terms here, we do not know
whether Authur is talking about Blood donations or Candy bars in a
store.  But my point is just to consider the implications of tying up
stock with mere prospects rather than customers.

I did not get as far as suggesting, but Authur could also consider
more sophisticated means of pooling the enquiries and limiting them to
10-20% of the stock, so that all enquiries are seeing the same pool.

All this is difficult without knowing the business in detail (which is
not the intention here), but I still say that it is be be considered.

Perhaps it is a B2B model within one company and in that case, it is
OK to hold the stock in advance.

Cheers and have a good Christmas,

Mark





On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:26:26 +0100, Andy Lacey
<andy at minstersystems.co.uk> wrote:
> As a customer of these kind of sites (and I am) I'd soon stop using it if it
> told me there were tickets, I said I'll take 1, went to the trouble of
> putting in my details, then my cc details, then it told me my tickets had
> been sold to someone else. It may sound like business sense not to hold that
> stock, but the longer term good business is not to aggravate your customers.
> 
> --
> Andy Lacey
> http://www.minstersystems.co.uk
> 
>



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