I owe you the rest of my La Maison du Whisky experience (remember that I ordered the Karuizawa 1981 #2634).
LMdW investigated my case (wrong stock indication, incorrect reminder e-mail, seemingly random order allocation) and sent me an answer. The clarification of the situation contains two arguments:
- Karuizawa is theoretically reserved for the domestic market and selling a big portion to international customers would bring logistic problems and criticism from French customers.So I suppose you have a higher chance of obtaining LMdW bottles if you enter a French shipping address? Didn’t expect that. Also I’m not sure can I agree with this policy. After all we’re all customers and you’re selling on the internet, not on Minitel. Also it’s not like there are plenty of other distributors of Karuizawa. In any case I’m sure it’s technically possible to limit certain products to certain countries (before the actual sale) and avoid the hassle.
- Because there were so few bottles, there is a system of allocations (by country, domestic on-license, domestic off-license and internet). But the system is not able to follow in real-time with highly popular releases.I understand the need for allocations (LMdW shop vs. website for example) but this doesn’t explain the problems. The website apparently didn’t respect any allocation at all, it just kept selling and selling.
The bottom line of the e-mail is this:
We have managed to resolve the problem and are working on putting in place measures to avoid similar problems in the future. We have managed to negotiate some bottles – which were originally allocated to other customer networks – so that we are now able to fulfil your orders, and to send you the bottles that you previously wanted: we hope that this goes some way to restoring your confidence in us.
They didn’t comment on the false reminder e-mail and I’m still not sure there is a real-time stock indication on the website after the “measures” they’re talking about. Let’s hope there’s at least some kind of (quick) response mechanism which limits sales of rapidly selling bottles. It’s better to sell just a few bottles and eventually offer the remaining stock after a few days than just take all the orders you can and having to refund most of them.
Anyway thanks to La Maison du Whisky for taking the time to investigate. I’m sure I’ll enjoy this Karuizawa twice as much now!