A whinge about peco's website

Wolf K wrote: [...]

I did send Peco an e-mail before posting this rant.

wolf k.

Perhaps you don't know about Peco's and Railway Modeller's early attitude to the internet. To say that they behaved like Luddite's would be a slight understatement. As you have worked out, they seem to be more interested in selling their paper catalogues rather than giving information to their customers. To be fair though they do have PDF files of their points which you can use to plan layouts.

Fred X

I would if they did them for O-gauge.

Peco have only just admitted to the existence of the internet - they even used to ban their advertisers from showing web and email addresses. Yes, the website is awful, but give them 20 years and they might have caught up with the 20th century. Another 20 years and they'll be in the

21st :-) Their attitude to the overseas market is all the more bizarre when the track they make is to HO scale, a non-UK standard.

I too think that the concept of punters having to pay for marketing material is bizarre. Just look at model railway shows - 75p or more for a couple of photocopied sheets from model railway stands, and an inch thick catalogue for free from a non-model railway stand (Squires). Look at the bigger picture - how many, I dunno, double-glazing companies charge for marketing material, how many of the companies you work for charge for advertising material? These days, there's no excuse for even the smallest of small traders to have even a basic website, and if they really can't stretch to a few sheets of A4 for shows then there's a problem with their business model. Even the local cleaners and gardeners can stretch to putting glossy, coloured flyers through my letterbox without charging me.

Rant over ;-)

But not for Code 55 N gauge track, or for 0 gauge track. The former

*might* have the same geometry as the code 80 stuff, but it would have been *so* easy for them to say so.

Pity, as these are exactly the two track ranges I was looking to use... Sod's law again.

In general, I agree with Wolf's comments. They are not alone, too many sellers seem to regard information about their products as some kind of state secret. I really can't see the point of loco kit makers, for example, not even bothering to show you a picture of the product, which may cost £ hundreds. Do they expect you to buy on the strength of that? OTOH, some go the extra mile, for instance I commend Jim McGeown of Connoisseur Models, who even has a fair percentage of his instruction sheets available for download.

David

Oh, it is, it's absolute crap. Not that the other manufacturers do remarkably better. With the possible exception of Hornby, they all look a bit cheapskate and amateurish.

That's also true of other manufacturers as well, though.

Mark

That's still fairly common across the industry, though. Bachmann, for example, won't allow Internet-only retailers to open a trade account with them. And Hornby's practice of attempting to keep their new release schedule a secret until the official release date is a throwback to pre-Internet days.

Of the major UK manufacturers, none of them really exploits the Internet to its maximum potential. Hornby has the best website, but they stick to print-era publicity practices and charge for their catalogue. Dapol are the best at using the Internet for giving out news of new products, but they don't have decent online product listing. Bachmann's website is functional but limited, and Peco are still stuck in the web 0.1 era.

Much the same applies to the retailers. Only a couple - Hattons and Rails - have what I'd call a professional-looking website design, and both of those could benefit from some significant improvements. Ontracks have the strapline "founded in 1999"; they might just as well have "website designed in 1999" as well.

Mark

Comet are good like that. Lots of instructions and helpful stuff as well as good photos/drawings of many of their products. In fact find it to be an easy site to use and seems regularly updated. Wish Trevor at Mercian would add a few more pictures/diagrams to his site, have managed to be bit confused with his 4mm Peckett.

Cheers, Simon

Also its worth having one of their catalogues as a reference especially when starting out. Does have fair bit of info in.

Cheers, Simon

Trouble is the radius classification is entrenched in the British scene and think its very useful for the new or casual modeller. It does really simplyfy things. Little new runs under 2nd radius and 3rd/4th are bigger than 2nd. Get the biggest you can fit. The actual radius means very little to most people (yep me included).

Now if the continental Era classification is anything like Bachmanns then that I dont like as years are quite easy to understand eg period 1950-1956, whereas a label such as Era 3 hides information. Fowler 2-6-4 in LMS red is in same Era as Duchess in LMS red but highly unlikely they ever ran in those liveries together - ignoring special circumstances such as preservation. The actual year ranges would show that.

Cheers, Simon

Spent an hour on the Virgin Mobile web site this AM. Bloody Useless doesn't begin to describe it. Then they had the cheek to ask me to fill out a survey! Wanted to know what they could improve. Told them to scrap it all and start over with somebody who knows what they're doing.

There is a level of consistency throughout the company. The phone droid is the "say 'more information'" type that has you battering your handset on the edge of your desk in less than two minutes. IF you ever get a human, you're still not quite sure ... Spent another hour on the phone with somebody in Rumania and have a faint hope I got my problem sorted out.

But that's a different matter of internet retailers undercutting the bricks and mortar shops. I'm sure that any shop owner could tell you stories of having spent a lot of time allow a customer to inspect a model and then the customer saying that they are going to buy it more cheaply on line. I don't think that it would do any of us any good if in a few years time there was only a few model retailers left, due to the online only shops taking all the business.

Fred X

Yes, but there is a hell of a lot or more competition in the Double glazing market so manufacturers will do anything to get publicity for their products. If Hornby gave away their catalogues I don't think it would mean that less people would buy Bachmann products.

You are right though about how ridiculous it is that some of the smaller retailers don't have websites. The most bizarre thing is that Replica Raliways still don't have any website, despite the fact that they manufacture RTR models! I know very little about HTML, but even I could set up a simple website within a few hours using a free WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Frontpage Express and it would at least let the world know that the company still exists!

Fred X

That's not a problem unique to railway modelling, though. It's an issue for any retailer, in almost any line of business. But, in any case, refusing to trade with Internet-only retailers isn't doing anything to prevent the products being available on the Internet. You can even buy Bachmann products on Amazon, despite the fact that Amazon doesn't have a bricks and mortar outlet.

Mark

It's not about selling on the internet though, it's about a proper model shop selling the items. If a model shop sells it via their website it's still money that is going into a bricks and mortar shop which will keep the business going, which presumably what Bachmann are concerned about.

And Amazon don't sell Bachmann, but model and toy shops sell their items via Amazon.

Fred X

That sort of thing seems to be a common misconception - same happens with "I bought this widget from eBay". No they didn't!

SNIP

Beware of some of those toyshop prices. Nearly bought some lego item from one at GBP160, then noticed lego catalogue advertised it at GBP120. Sure enough lego website sold it at the catalogue price. Its so easy to get caught !

Cheers, Simon

Online retailers *are* "proper" shops. To suggest that an online model retailer isn't a proper model shop is as daft as suggesting that Amazon isn't a proper bookshop. A shop is defined by what it sells, not by where it sells it.

Which, to customers, is exactly the same thing. And it also has exactly the same efect on Bachmann and traditional bricks-and-mortar shops.

In any case, it's easy to get around the requirement for a bricks-and-mortar shop simply by having a small customer-facing showroom at what is otherwise a distribution warehouse. That's what OnTracks do, for example - I'd be surprised if anything more than a tiny proportion of their sales is to personal callers.

(Although Ontracks is notable also for having a really badly designed website; they may be the closest that we've got to a major pure-play online model railway retailer but they're wasting a lot of their potential).

Mark

Amazon in the US sells Bachmann Direct, not just through other vendors.