WTF Warmoth Guitars!!!!?????

What just do not understand is how a company that clearly prides itself on quality doesn't freak out out the state of the site.
Whatever the team, dev process, tech, etc, bottom line is that they're hurting their business by not dealing with that particular elephant in the room.
Hopefully they'll wake up some day.
 
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The couple of times I attempted to spec out a custom neck on their website, I ended up just closing the browser window and ordering from someone else.
 
I received an email back from Warmoth after contacting them in regards to their website:

Hello,
We are aware that the new site is slower. That is primarily because we had to change how to manage the products and data. The old website used virtual items and didn't have to verify availability etc. This caused several internal issues that our customers were typically not affected by but created many internal problems and website failures that had to be constantly corrected.
The new site is loaded with all up to date information and each page has to validate. We are working on improving speeds but do not have an eta on the resolution time. Like the old site, we will always be working on improvements over the years.


Best Regards,

Jeff Bridges
Warmoth Guitar Products, Inc.
Customer Service Supervisor
PHONE 253-845-0403
www.warmoth.com
 
ruso said:
I received an email back from Warmoth after contacting them in regards to their website:

Hello,
We are aware that the new site is slower. That is primarily because we had to change how to manage the products and data. The old website used virtual items and didn't have to verify availability etc. This caused several internal issues that our customers were typically not affected by but created many internal problems and website failures that had to be constantly corrected.
The new site is loaded with all up to date information and each page has to validate. We are working on improving speeds but do not have an eta on the resolution time. Like the old site, we will always be working on improvements over the years.


Best Regards,

Jeff Bridges
Warmoth Guitar Products, Inc.
Customer Service Supervisor
PHONE 253-845-0403
www.warmoth.com
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This is a stupid approach. There is absolutely no need for any sort of constant validation of their inventory for every web page. Since the only way this becomes a problem is if someone buys an item that another customer was also trying to buy. Every single shopping site has this problem. The only time you have to validate that an item is available is when you actually make the purchase. And they already have to do this anyhow. For bonus points, they could do something like firing off a background request to check for item availability once the page loads and then let the user know if something was purchased that they wanted.
 
Also, whoever is doing the database programming has a lot to learn. The amount of individual items they have to track is trivial. Maybe in the tens of thousands. That's nothing. My last project that involved databases had to contend with hundreds of millions of things all the time. Our data requests for loading a page were usually well under a 100 milliseconds. If our pages were taking nearly a minute to load, there'd be people working late until it was fixed.
 
hippietim said:
Also, whoever is doing the database programming has a lot to learn. The amount of individual items they have to track is trivial. Maybe in the tens of thousands. That's nothing. My last project that involved databases had to contend with hundreds of millions of things all the time. Our data requests for loading a page were usually well under a 100 milliseconds. If our pages were taking nearly a minute to load, there'd be people working late until it was fixed.
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Maybe they're storing images as BLOBs, too? Sounds like a poor design, for certain.
 
Either customer experience is a priority or it's not, and either they're willing to pay someone enough to get a bottom line acceptable response time or they're not.

There are some reports on both of my two systems that take a while to display, but not every listing of anything. Every system is different, but bottom line here...
 
hippietim said:
This is a stupid approach. There is absolutely no need for any sort of constant validation of their inventory for every web page. Since the only way this becomes a problem is if someone buys an item that another customer was also trying to buy. Every single shopping site has this problem. The only time you have to validate that an item is available is when you actually make the purchase. And they already have to do this anyhow. For bonus points, they could do something like firing off a background request to check for item availability once the page loads and then let the user know if something was purchased that they wanted.
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It is even more stupid to totally block the read access to their forum from some specific countries because they are afraid of spam.

That is preventing me from purchasing my next build from them, because there is a lot of valued information and pictures at the forum. I have purchased a wrong neck from them. If I were at the forum I would have consulted before ordering, and I would have been properly advised.
 
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Oh, and I forgot to mention…

To add to the validity of our concerns, I did include a link to this thread in my email to them. Hopefully they’ll read this and take note.
 
hippietim said:
This is a stupid approach. There is absolutely no need for any sort of constant validation of their inventory for every web page. Since the only way this becomes a problem is if someone buys an item that another customer was also trying to buy. Every single shopping site has this problem. The only time you have to validate that an item is available is when you actually make the purchase. And they already have to do this anyhow. For bonus points, they could do something like firing off a background request to check for item availability once the page loads and then let the user know if something was purchased that they wanted.
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Bet the website and their inventory management system aren’t one in the same. So each item displayed gets its own check against some archaic system before they show it to you.
 
I just assumed it was my internet connection since I’m usually relying on 4g mobile speed out in the boonies ;-) everything is slow
 
unix-guy said:
Maybe they're storing images as BLOBs, too? Sounds like a poor design, for certain.
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LOL. Had a "clever" content editor at a prior job storing images in HTML via the data:base64 encoding method in the src attribute of the image tag. Full size, and used the width/height to make the giant pictures fit on the page....
 
hippietim said:
This is a stupid approach. There is absolutely no need for any sort of constant validation of their inventory for every web page.
Click to expand...

Even without this fairly valid point, inventory doesn't change fast enough to require a new inventory DB query every minute. A simple cache invalidation and checking strategy could fix this. Simply write a new flat file of inventory data for the type of item (tele body, or strat neck, or whatever) when it changes. The front end could check whether the version of that item type had changed, do nothing most of the time, and only pull that section of the inventory list when it had actually changed. No need to query ALL OF THE THINGS every time you click something....
 
Dave Merrill said:
Even if you do query all the things every time, performance should be way better than it is.
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The problem seems to be: random people from a developer pool working on granular bits of an application with no real unifying technical lead overseeing planning and execution of the business' whims while under extreme pressure to deliver more, quicker, for less $$$$.
 
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Joe Bfstplk said:
The problem seems to be: random people from a developer pool working on granular bits of an application with no real unifying technical lead overseeing planning and execution of the business' whims while under extreme pressure to deliver more, quicker, for less $$$$.
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Yes. "Technical progress" according to the executives. "Sucks ass" according to the people who wrote the original version and now have to maintain the new 'n improved version at 3 AM.
 
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