reb78 Posted December 2, 2021 Share Posted December 2, 2021 19 minutes ago, David Sparkes said: Possibly the Suez event referred to was the container ship stuck in the bank for some time. Regards. Maybe..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smallfry Posted December 2, 2021 Share Posted December 2, 2021 12 hours ago, SteveG said: I didn’t use them often as once an order was placed it almost went into a black hole. Stuff would always eventually arrive, but you didn’t know when unless you contacted them. Glad it was not just me. This was my one and only experience of them. Never used them again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
missingsid Posted December 2, 2021 Share Posted December 2, 2021 3 hours ago, Mo Murphy said: Do you think that a military event in the late 1950s is still having an effect ? Mo 😉 If it is you can blame my dad as he bombed Egypt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L19MUD Posted December 2, 2021 Share Posted December 2, 2021 20 minutes ago, smallfry said: Glad it was not just me. This was my one and only experience of them. Never used them again. I always collected so never had that issue. They would ring me as soon as parts were in and ready to collect Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Will@LRW Posted December 2, 2021 Share Posted December 2, 2021 This is a proper shame for all involved. They were my go-to retailer. Knowing that I could buy genuine parts and they would arrive in a sealed Land Rover bag was worth the extra price. Or ordering Bearmach and not getting Britpart 😄. They'd also helped me many times with parts damaged in transit, or finding obsolete parts elsewhere. Sounds like PCI DSS compliance caught them out. Their shop software was 5 years after end of life and PHP version 3 years, which shows a lack of investment. It got them in the end. Can't even begin to imagine where £200k went on a shop migration. Although i've also seen £2million spent in a year on web development that produced nothing but redundancies. There's some other parts retailers with even older websites.... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nonimouse Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 Never used them, but it's still a shame Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snagger Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 14 hours ago, Will@LRW said: . Can't even begin to imagine where £200k went on a shop migration. Although i've also seen £2million spent in a year on web development that produced nothing but redundancies. There's some other parts retailers with even older websites.... £200k on shop migration might be plausible when you consider how much work has to go into the stock control side, not just the website front end. Some IT companies are expensive, and some will inflate prices if the customer isn’t already pretty IT savvy. But look at the government “Track and Trace” scheme and how many billions were invested in a malfunctioning Excel spreadsheet! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L19MUD Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 15 hours ago, Will@LRW said: This is a proper shame for all involved. They were my go-to retailer. Knowing that I could buy genuine parts and they would arrive in a sealed Land Rover bag was worth the extra price. Or ordering Bearmach and not getting Britpart 😄. They'd also helped me many times with parts damaged in transit, or finding obsolete parts elsewhere. Sounds like PCI DSS compliance caught them out. Their shop software was 5 years after end of life and PHP version 3 years, which shows a lack of investment. It got them in the end. Can't even begin to imagine where £200k went on a shop migration. Although i've also seen £2million spent in a year on web development that produced nothing but redundancies. There's some other parts retailers with even older websites.... @Will@LRW I think you need to create a post in the international forum about your website as I had no idea about it and it would have saved me hours just last week. The ability to view the Microcat diagrams, click parts and add them to a list is great. The ability to view that list and get a price by supplier (and stock availability) is simply amazing! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve b Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 What is the website Sam ? Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L19MUD Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 15 minutes ago, steve b said: What is the website Sam ? Steve That would have been a clever thing to mention! https://www.lrworkshop.com/ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve b Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geoffbeaumont Posted December 3, 2021 Share Posted December 3, 2021 3 hours ago, Snagger said: £200k on shop migration might be plausible when you consider how much work has to go into the stock control side, not just the website front end. Some IT companies are expensive, and some will inflate prices if the customer isn’t already pretty IT savvy. But look at the government “Track and Trace” scheme and how many billions were invested in a malfunctioning Excel spreadsheet! There will be some customisation involved in handling original/OEM/pattern equivalents, but I wouldn't have thought anything much else custom on the customer facing side of things, so that part should have been nowhere anywhere close to £200k. The big question is whether the project also covered their stock keeping, and what other systems (in house stock control, external suppliers, drop shopping suppliers) it had to integrate with or migrate existing data from. If some of those were similarly antiquated (which is highly likely) then there could have been a lot of work there - as much in figuring out how the existing systems work as anything, usually there's no spec, no-one actually knows and over the years they've acquired a huge number of hideous hacks carried out by developers who didn't know what they were doing. Still, even with a lot of complexity uncovered along the way I'd expect £200k to deliver a fully working system (and tested, but the problem here may have had more to do with putting it live before the job was finished). I wonder if the head of IT jumped ship because he knew he'd Mildly miffed all that money up the wall? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim_NZ Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 Wow, what a shock, and a shame! They we my main go to for parts, excellent to deal with and always very helpful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
missingsid Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 On 12/2/2021 at 10:20 PM, Will@LRW said: Sounds like PCI DSS compliance caught them out. Their shop software was 5 years after end of life and PHP version 3 years, which shows a lack of investment. It got them in the end. There's some other parts retailers with even older websites.... That was my thought, but naive if so as they should have had annual checks for compliance and a forward plan. It kind of depends if the bank was working with them proactively or just sat back and threw in a deadline. If they'd had a breach the multi £m fines could have killed them either way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snagger Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 23 hours ago, geoffbeaumont said: There will be some customisation involved in handling original/OEM/pattern equivalents, but I wouldn't have thought anything much else custom on the customer facing side of things, so that part should have been nowhere anywhere close to £200k. The big question is whether the project also covered their stock keeping, and what other systems (in house stock control, external suppliers, drop shopping suppliers) it had to integrate with or migrate existing data from. If some of those were similarly antiquated (which is highly likely) then there could have been a lot of work there - as much in figuring out how the existing systems work as anything, usually there's no spec, no-one actually knows and over the years they've acquired a huge number of hideous hacks carried out by developers who didn't know what they were doing. Still, even with a lot of complexity uncovered along the way I'd expect £200k to deliver a fully working system (and tested, but the problem here may have had more to do with putting it live before the job was finished). I wonder if the head of IT jumped ship because he knew he'd Mildly miffed all that money up the wall? That’s what I’m getting at, apart from the IT boss, which I didn’t know about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happyoldgit Posted December 4, 2021 Share Posted December 4, 2021 I'm not sure the conjecture and speculation is offering anything here. 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonpelly Posted December 8, 2021 Share Posted December 8, 2021 Hi Folks, Wondering if folk know anything about Britcar? Their website is non-functional and Google seems to suggest permanently closed? Simon... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daveturnbull Posted December 8, 2021 Share Posted December 8, 2021 See here: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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