Joel Shore's Blog

RitzCamera.com Explains it All

The people at RitzCamera.com did their homework and finally got back to me. In fact, I had a pleasant conversation with the company’s chief financial officer. We’re all friends again. The problem’s in their order processing system are the government’s fault, apparently, but we’ll get to that later.

Mr. CFO was mortified and apologetic about my prior very bad experience as a customer on his company’s Web site. You’ll recall that my first online order simply disappeared into the ether, beyond the query reach of the customer service rep I spoke with.

“We process thousands of orders every day and it’s inevitable that a few get kicked out of the system for manual processing,” he said. Reasons for this include a bad address, invalid credit card, or issues with a distributor. Though he didn’t know the specific reason my order jumped up and said “fix me,” he did know that the customer service rep (CSR) in India processing the order deleted it from the system. “The rep screwed up,” said Mr. CFO. “He is not doing this job any more.”

The deletion caused the order to disappear – at least as far as this rank-and-file CSR was concerned. Only A super-CSR would be able to find it. The online order eventually was located by the company’s customer service head. “It was never actually out of the system,” says Mr. CFO.

Well, ok. We don’t know why the order got bounced, but we do know it still was in the system.

As for the second order, here’s where our own little financial meltdown happened.

RitzCamera.com, like thousands of other large corporations, uses a variety of distributors to fulfill customer orders. Which distributor the system assigns to a particular line item on an order may not be the one physically closest to the customer’s delivery address. Well, that seems pretty silly, right? Read on.

Here's where the plot takes an unexpected twist. Enter, a new character: tax nexus. It makes life very difficult in the universe we know as online order fulfillment, or eCommerce. In a nutshell, this means that a company based in any state must charge sales tax – regardless of the physical location of the item being purchased, if the company – or even its fulfillment distributor has a brick-and-mortar presence in the state to which the order is being delivered. Yeah, I know.

RitzCamera.com, based in California, has no presence in Massachusetts, where I live. (The Ritz Camera stores you see in the local mall belong to a different corporation, and are not a factor.) What a smart fulfillment application does is find a distributor that has the item in stock AND which has no tax nexus, in this case, in Massachusetts. I think it’s silly, but let’s go along with this just for laughs.

Now, we get to the truly odd circumstance that made the second order bounce.

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