Stuart is MD of Urban33 Limited and has been selling online for as long as I can remember. Today he’s got an interesting insight on just what lengths someone will go to if they really want to buy your products:
With international online trade now well in the sights of most sellers in the UK, with some big companies selling more international than in the UK I thought I would share a little story with you.
The other week we had a strange phone call from a gentleman in Russia who wanted to purchase some of our stainless sphere ornaments. He seemed a little vague with his intentions and the team member that spoke to him told him we were unable to dispatch them to him as we didn’t send to Russia. He said he would call back and organise someone to collect them.
Anyway we didn’t think much to it and a few days went by when the gentleman called again to place an order of around £80 worth of spheres. He told the team member that someone would collect the items on Thursday, two days later.
We packaged up the order and had it ready for collection thinking it would be collected by a courier to then be dispatched through their network.
Thursday morning came and around 10am we had a call from a lady who said she had just landed at Heathrow and need directions to our warehouse to collect the order. Two and half hours later a blond Russian lady turned up at the door with a driver and collected the spheres and she said she needed to be quick to get back to Heathrow to catch her 6pm flight back to Russia.
It turned out the spheres were to be used in a television show, Russia’s version of the cube and the production company had flown her here to collect them!
That is one expensive set of balls!
2 Responses
They would certainly not trust the Russian Postal Service – they are as reliable as a British Leyland car. Nice story .
We once had a man turn up at our showroom to have a look at the yard of ale glasses we stock.
Turned out he had driven all the way from a pub he owns in The Netherlands to buy one yard of ale because his had broken and they were having a party the next day.
He spent 10 minutes in the showroom, bought his yard and drove back home to the Netherlands.