This is a good example as it really does lay the Amazon gig bare. LPL knows his stuff but, for customer recommendations, do you really need LPL level product knowledge?
Nope.
I have sold locks as just one of thousands of products in the bicycle trade and you don't need to sell that many to know what you should be recommending to customers. It is not difficult. You don't have to pick/angle-grind them, you just need to listen to the customers.
There is a forest of locks out there, all different for slightly different use cases and customers do need a little bit of advice to get the right one. It is one of those situations where you can have two out of three of these things: security, a nice price or a manageable weight.
There is unwritten moral obligation to provide some customer service, as a shop assistant it would be pathologically wrong to sell someone a lock that is not suited for their use case. The same goes for any other product.
Sure there may be times when you might try your hardest to shift inventory, e.g. the models with last year's packaging that have got a bit dusty, or the ones that are over-abundant in the warehouse. But you can do that responsibly so the customer knows what the deal is.
In normal retail with a finite amount of shelf space you do not have sub-standard clone products taking up tonnes of space with little product differentiation. It makes no sense to sell these products as the profit from the sale is nowhere near as good as what you get selling a legitimate product. Besides, how on earth are the customers supposed to choose when the options are mind-boggling?
With the LPL Amazon locks series it seems clear to me that Amazon are selling highly branded products that are useless as 'choice' as well as off-brand junk as 'choice'. If a regular shop assistant was doing what they were doing then you would wonder whether they were trying to destroy the company!
In regular retail if you realise that some locks are sub-standard then you get the customers coming back with some horror story about how their shed was raided. Or they come in with the remains of what the thieves left behind. After profuse apologies they are cool about it, they have insurance and you help them get what they need. You then decide not to stock the offending locks again or to sell them only to people who are okay with the compromise.
Amazon just do not have this type of a feedback loop, they are not trimming down their range to only offer the customer the good stuff. They just don't get this aspect of customer service even though they excel in other areas.
Nope.
I have sold locks as just one of thousands of products in the bicycle trade and you don't need to sell that many to know what you should be recommending to customers. It is not difficult. You don't have to pick/angle-grind them, you just need to listen to the customers.
There is a forest of locks out there, all different for slightly different use cases and customers do need a little bit of advice to get the right one. It is one of those situations where you can have two out of three of these things: security, a nice price or a manageable weight.
There is unwritten moral obligation to provide some customer service, as a shop assistant it would be pathologically wrong to sell someone a lock that is not suited for their use case. The same goes for any other product.
Sure there may be times when you might try your hardest to shift inventory, e.g. the models with last year's packaging that have got a bit dusty, or the ones that are over-abundant in the warehouse. But you can do that responsibly so the customer knows what the deal is.
In normal retail with a finite amount of shelf space you do not have sub-standard clone products taking up tonnes of space with little product differentiation. It makes no sense to sell these products as the profit from the sale is nowhere near as good as what you get selling a legitimate product. Besides, how on earth are the customers supposed to choose when the options are mind-boggling?
With the LPL Amazon locks series it seems clear to me that Amazon are selling highly branded products that are useless as 'choice' as well as off-brand junk as 'choice'. If a regular shop assistant was doing what they were doing then you would wonder whether they were trying to destroy the company!
In regular retail if you realise that some locks are sub-standard then you get the customers coming back with some horror story about how their shed was raided. Or they come in with the remains of what the thieves left behind. After profuse apologies they are cool about it, they have insurance and you help them get what they need. You then decide not to stock the offending locks again or to sell them only to people who are okay with the compromise.
Amazon just do not have this type of a feedback loop, they are not trimming down their range to only offer the customer the good stuff. They just don't get this aspect of customer service even though they excel in other areas.