A bit of patience please . . . and oh, don’t shop at Amazon!– Kevin Buckle

Online sales are a lifeline for stores like Avalanche, but it’s amazing how much time they take up, writes Kevin Buckle

Amazon has raised expectations about online sales that can be hard to meet for independent stores (Picture:Chris Radburn/PA Wire)

High street shops may be reopening soon but those that will thrive in the future will on the whole be those that have used the time they were closed either to start an online presence or build on what was already in place.

There is of course an exception to that rule in Primark but otherwise businesses of all sizes will have seen an increase in online sales that if maintained to some extent may fill the gap of any lost shop sales as the high street struggles to recover.

However, it should not be underestimated how much extra time an online sale takes compared to simply putting items in a bag in a shop and given the extra vigilance that will be needed now in shops it certainly may not be easy to get the balance right in allocating time to both sources of revenue.

One thing though has become clear to me and that is why it is so hard to speak to anybody these days on the phone if you have a query and why even before sending a message you are asked to read through a long list of frequently asked questions.

Having reached a far wider spectrum of people with the Avalanche website recently what I wasn’t ready for was the large number of questions and the expectations of people who mostly shop on Amazon.

Don’t get me wrong the majority of people are perfectly sensible but the more sales you have the more time can be taken up dealing with a reasonably sized minority.

Ironically I’ve been too busy to make up my own FAQ list to try to reduce the questions and free up more time to actually send people stuff. A common yardstick is if a customer has ordered one thing that arrived the next day.

Even when we were messaging people to say Royal Mail were warning of delays I would be told by customers that they didn’t understand why they had received one order placed on the same day while all the others they had placed were yet to appear.

In that query lies a clue to the problem. Many people are working from home earning decent money and breaking up their day with some internet shopping.

Now this is a good thing generally for me and of course it is something that will continue to the end of the year at least but it does mean that folk do have the time to message you on a Monday “wondering” when that order they placed on Friday night might arrive.

Overall given what I hear from others both in the music industry and further afield I actually get things quite easy so I don’t have too much to complain about and it is more about whether there will be the time to deal with everything once the shop is open but still needing those online sales.

I have known worse though. When we sold on Amazon in the early days of Amazon marketplace most of our negative feedback consisted of people who hadn’t liked the CD they had bought. We gave up even bothering to comment in reply.

It does of course go without saying that they were simpler times and you should never use Amazon now!