There has recently been a lot of talk about online stores in Pakistan being unable to fulfill orders. We do not want to make excuses or deflect the blame instead we want to take this opportunity to accept that we are one of those companies that have let our customers down and we feel it’s time for us to change.
When I came up with the idea for bytes.pk, one of the first people I recruited was Umair Jafar who was the founder of iShopping. One of our first conversations was about what we should sell on bytes and Umair was of the opinion that we should sell everything or at least list everything and see what orders we start getting. At that time I realised that we should not sell what sells but rather what we can actually ship and so we decided that we would keep a small product catalogue but ensure we would ship every order we got. When we started out we were able to keep up with orders but as more and more orders started coming in we began accepting more and more orders, many times more than the inventory we had on hand. We were hoping to fulfill orders with the next stock we were receiving. Unfortunately what we learnt was that you can never really know what to expect from a lot of used phones, all of them could end up being damaged. Suddenly we were getting more damaged phones than we expected and we had this backlog of order forms which we were having a tough time fulfilling. We began calling customers and pushing back delivery dates again and again. While doing all this our biggest mistake was that we forgot the pain of our customers. We kept believing that we could do it and we started sharing in the joy of the 90% of the customers who got their phones and forgot to shoulder the pain of the 10% of the customers who were left waiting months for a phone not knowing whether they would actually receive it. If I myself was one of those customers who did not receive their order I would probably never shop online again and thus I feel like bytes.pk has not only let down our customers and our team but rather the whole industry.
From today we have decided to push for 100% fulfilment. It will not be an easy task, we will probably see a fall in our sales numbers but we would rather sell less and keep our customers happy. Over the course of the next week our team will go through our product listings and ensure we are only selling those products which we are 100% sure we can fulfill on time. A lot of our customers ask us why we do not keep inventory of everything. Our initial plan was to do exactly that and to do that we began approaching international brands and became their distributors so that we could have ready stock. We kept buying stock but a point came when the process became very capital intensive and it was no longer possible for us to hold more stock. Over the last few weeks we have started increasing our inventory and now stock nearly 60% of the products which we sell. We began approaching local vendors for products and they started sending us these long price lists, and that is where we went wrong. In Pakistan every online store has gotten into this race to list every product on their website without first finding a way to actually fulfill the product. We, bytes.pk, ourselves got lost in this race and lost sight of our real goal, to satisfy our customers. An example is there was a time when we began listing LED TV’s and we forgot to actually work out a delivery plan with the courier company. When our first order came in we came to know that our shipping partner does not do cash on delivery of large packages. So it was actually after the first order that we built a delivery plan, and that was a terrible mistake on our part.
Over the next few weeks you will see less products added to our website and you will see numerous products get deleted, but hopefully you will not have to wait in vain for an order. We know the pain a customer has to go through placing an order and then the excitement of the waiting period. We can only imagine how terrible it would be to wake up expecting a delivery only to find out it still has not shipped.
While we hope the changes we are implementing will help us ensure that no future orders are left unfulfilled we have not forgotten those customers who had to suffer because of our poor services. We want to at least try and make it up to you. One of our representatives will get in touch with every customer who has an unfulfilled order and offer an Rs 1000 gift certificate. We will also do our level best to fulfill all your orders right away.
We have let you down and we hope you guys will give us a second chance to prove ourselves. We promise that from now on we will work towards 100% fulfillment. We know we will not be able to achieve it right away but we will try to get their as fast as we can. Our aim is to be at 100% fulfillment within 4 weeks. We know sorry is not enough but still we also want to say, we are sorry.
P.S – This is an unedited/untouched version as I believe that our customers should know the whole truth and nothing should be hidden from them.
If you ever have any complains feel free to get in touch with me personally at mohammed@bytes.pk or you can email our support team at support@bytes.pk.
Mohammed Khanani
CEO – bytes.pk