I know that I'm probably going to catch a lot of shit for this. But here it goes anyways. I've dealt with 100's of customers at this point, and many of you are just awesome. Patient, knowledgeable, experienced, kind, and generous. Some of you.. not so much. And that's okay too, but I thought a little insight into life as a vendor would help the community understand Vendors a little better.
We are not Amazon or Zappos. Yes. We are a business, and by taking orders and accepting payments, we take on the responsibility of behaving like a legit business, however there are certain things about our specific industry that require(and justify) a little leeway.
We are operating an ILLEGAL business. Because of this fact, certain standards that you(the consumer) have developed from working with/purchasing from LEGAL businesses, don't exactly hold true.
The first place I'd start is this. Most of the markets we use aren't built by development companies. They load slowly. Their UI is often poorly designed. It isn't some custom built interface that makes life easy. If a site sucks(like blackbank and nucleus do...) the load time can be 20 seconds. Let's say I have to look at 50 orders in a day, along wtih another 50 messages.(and then reply to all 50 messages). that is 150 pages I have to load. at 20 seconds a page, that's 3000 seconds total. I'm spending 50 minutes a day just waiting on pages to load! Amazon's orders, once placed, are directly routed to the warehouse, where the product is already packed/ready. It is picked off a shelf, a label is automatically printed, and bam. Fedex is there are 4 o'clock to pick it up and ship it. VENDING IS NOTHING LIKE THIS!!!
In order to ship drugs via the mail, one has to purchase supplies. We need bags, sealers, gloves, stamps, shipping labels, envelopes, packages, etc. These items can't be purchased online, delivered to our home, or anything that could potentially involve a paper trail. All of these things have to be sourced discreetly, and in the event we run low on something, we can't just go replace it instantly. Keeping track of all of the inventory for both supplies, and products, can be challenging at times.
We can't post an ad on Craigslist or Monster to hire help. Hiring help involves assessing the risk the employee is taking on, and finding someone who will A: take that risk for a salary that is feasible, as well as B: (hopefully) not rat on the business in the event the risk catches up with them. It's not easy to find people you trust, people you are comfortable exposing to certain levels of risk, as well as people who are intelligent enough/reliable enough to do a quality job with whatever the task is.
When orders are packed, and need to be shipped, Vendors can not just schedule a pickup with USPS. In our particular circumstance, we have mapped out every PO in a 90 mile radius. We schedule our delivery people to pick one at random, in a different direction than was used the day prior, and have them drive there. Once there, the delivery person has to park a ways away, walk/ride to the PO, make the drop, get back to their vehicle, and amke the 90 minute ride home. That's a good 4 hours per day. (assuming they only have to hit 1-2 PO's. )
Packing product with multiple layers of vac seal/mbb is VERY time consuming. Cutting bags, weighing product, letting the sealer cool between seals/layers, etc. All of this requires time. It doesn't just happen instantly.
Responding to messages takes time. A message comes in. The vendor then needs to search through their spreadsheet/orders, find the order, cross reference the address, verify the tracking number(often by way of using a separate computer/wifi connection), and then respond. This is not an instantaneous process.
Most vendors receive messages on at least two markets, as well as on reddit, to their email, their jabber, and possibly other locations. A busy/popular vendor can easily send/receive several hundred messages a day. (I konw we do). This is also time consuming.
Mistakes happen. Orders get shipped in incorrect amounts. Orders get lost on occasion and not shipped at all. A vendor who ships 200 orders a week, and does so with a 98% perfection rate, will still have at least 4 orders per week experience some kind of hiccup. Now there is no excuse for any error that puts the customer's safety in question. I would never attempt to justify such behavior. BUT order quantity being slightly off, an order not getting shipped on occasion, etc. IT HAPPENS. Please politely contact the vendor, and ask them what they intend to do about it. I know that our personal policy is to ship ASAP, and include some extra to offset our mistake.
Just my two cents. Let the shit talking begin. Haters, go ahead and hate. The rest of you, please take some of this into account when interacting with your vendor. thanks
New vendor here, take this with a grain of salt.
This is a decent look into a vendors day to day. I can appreciate someone trying to get vendors some slack (speaking as a consumer whos worked with vendors), however, I believe the reasons vendors make so many mistakes and experience delays is not because we operate within the world of DNM's; the reality is most vendors just don't have any idea how to effectively and efficiently run a business, and have had little to no experience doing so in any sort of meaningful way before getting into vending. I would go as far as to guess most dont even have any meaningful real world professional experience. For someone to choose to get heavily into vending is doing so because its going to be a vertical move up the socioeconomic ladder for them. That being the case, its unrealistic to expect someone to step into an unfamiliar environment (running an online business) and meet expectations that they've never been faced with previously, DNM or not. More or less, the ones that run into so many of these issues, are likely the ones who bit off more than they can chew.
From perusing around how various vendors go about running their online "business" (between their profile page, official review threads, their public persona, how they advertise, etc), I get the impression most vendors are users of their respective products that also just happen to have access to some sort of supply-- any sort of business acumen is just a bonus. I think most vendors dive in head first and I would guess many of the succesful vendors are the ones that were able to succesfully endure the trial by fire, before figuring out how to run their business.
Also, more of an aside, I think you do your over arching point injustice when you choose to write words in all caps rather than articulating your argument. The points of where and how you choose to do it comes off kind of insulting to your target audience. For example, where you choose to highlight that vendors operate in an illegal dealings rather than legal....cmon now.
Anyway, just my 2 cents and good topic to get the community discussing!