When Your Supplier Lets You Down, What Can You Do? A Guide For Ecommerce Businesses

In the ecommerce world, you’re already up against enough. Abandoned baskets, tax changes, search engine algorithm adjustments that send you right down the page; the digital platform comes with some very unique business risks. 

So when your supplier decides to let you down and interrupt your business flow, it’s more than just a frustration. It can be genuinely damaging to your business, reputation, and profit margins. 

But what can you do? If the shipment is going to be late, it’s unlikely to get there any faster. If stock has been depleted, they can’t magic more into the warehouse. There doesn’t seem like much you can do, and you can feel incredibly stuck. 

However, when you’re dealing with supply line issues, you have more power over the process than you realise. As such, here’s what to do when your supplier has thrown a spanner into the works. 

Make a Complaint

This is always going to be the first step in trying to claim back any money you’ve lost. Make a complaint to the supplier about what you're missing or what’s been delayed, and ask for a resolution. 

If need be, you can contact the supplier’s complaints’ department - the email for which may be hidden deep in their pages somewhere - and outline your issue clearly. 

Note what went wrong, what was promised, and how you expect the supplier to make up for it. Be polite in this correspondence, but make sure you’re firm enough that you’re taken seriously. 

Check for Breach of Contract

If you have a contract with your supplier, that’s been signed and dated by both parties, you could have a breach of contract on your hands. 

Even if you only have written confirmation of the supplier’s duties - like in an email where they said they’d get orders to you within a certain timeframe - you could still have a contract issue to discuss. 

Double check for evidence of this with software that offers eDiscovery solutions. Just tap in what you’re looking for and let the program pull out any pertinent information. This way you won’t need to spare a few hours to comb through documents, emails, and messages.

Source More Than One Supplier

If you’ve only been working with the one supplier up until this point, let this be a bit of a lesson! Most businesses have more than one supplier in their chain, both of whom work in tandem to deliver the right goods on time, and this keeps everything flowing smoothly. 

Of course, as a small ecommerce business, you’re likely to only have one supplier for the foreseeable future. After all, you’re likely on quite the strict budget! But this is where you can shop around to find alternatives, as well as get in touch to get quotes and strike up connections.

When your supplier lets you down, don’t let your ecommerce business take the fall quietly. Make sure the supplier knows something is wrong, check your supply contract, and even start looking elsewhere.