So much for J-List

Maybe it was the interview.

I’m not sure, but for what­ever rea­son, Tara’s second order from J-List dis­ap­peared. All the processes were gone through, and she got her noti­fi­ca­tion that the order was places, and that she’s be receiv­ing a con­fir­ma­tion email within 24 hours. 24 hours passes, and no email. Tara con­tacts J-List, which tell her that it’s odd that she never received a con­fir­ma­tion email. They tell her to order again.

Herein lies the problem.

J-List keeps a revolv­ing stock of their prod­ucts. Every­thing that they keep in inven­tory is in a “lim­ited quan­tity”, which is some­thing I’ve found to be a plus and a minus for their site. It’s rel­a­tively smart, since they con­stantly bring in new items with­out hav­ing to have a mas­sive inven­tory or have to have peo­ple scrolling through hun­dreds of items to see what’s avail­able. It’s not as smart, how­ever, when you run out of a prod­uct that peo­ple have a demand for, and you don’t know when you can get it back in.

Tara ordered a lot of stuff from J-List this par­tic­u­lar time; not enough to even put into mem­ory, so repli­cat­ing the order would have been tough enough as it stands. Add onto that the fact that a decent per­cent­age of items that Tara did know she ordered aren’t on the site any­more, and are there­fore not avail­able. It was bad enough wait­ing for a pack­age that had to come over from Japan and go though cutoms; add onto that wait­ing for J-List to deter­mine when (and if) they were going to restock the prod­ucts we wanted, and you start to get into a seri­ous wait for what you’re look­ing for. That’s just bad business.

It’s becom­ing more evi­dent that Peter Payne did study too much Japan­ese (as he said in his inter­view) when he went to Japan, and not enough busi­ness. Most com­pa­nies that sell prod­ucts (espe­cially online) stop sell­ing the prod­uct when their stock gets very low, but not zero. This assures that in a worst case sene­rio things can be replaced (if bro­ken or lost), and more impor­tantly, will keep cus­tomers happy, because the prod­uct that they ordered will be received. J-List, instead of try­ing to make a bad sit­u­a­tion bet­ter, took an “oh well” approach, and never took any action to cor­rect it.

Well, need­less to say, Tara’s had it with J-List, and I can’t say I’ll rec­om­mend them again. If you want Japan­ese porn, they seem to be the place to go (since Peter seems to take a great inter­est in it), but out­side of that, it’s a crap­shoot. Damn shame, is what it is.