Every Single Scott Album On Amos Advantage Backordered

What is that all about? Nothing in stock at all.

All albums are print to order and none are in stock unless you get very lucky.

Even a lot of older supplements are print to order.

Been that way for a while now.

I never knew that. Thank you.

Yeah, print-on-demand is how Amos can keep selling the wide range of products that they do. If they had to actually print and warehouse them, it would be far too expensive, as many of the albums they sell can't be terribly high demand and inventory would turn over too slowly.

It's also how a small company like Palo can get away with selling specialty albums for every single country, hingeless or regular, color or black and white.

They mark every set of pages as "backordered" which is the source of customer confusion. When a lot of people see "backordered," they're likely to think, "Well then, I'll wait until the item I want is in stock before I place an order." That is exactly what you don't want your customers doing. I'm not always sure Amos/Scott thinks things through very well, and this is one example.

If you operate by the principle of "print on demand," you need orders so you can print the pages. No orders (while people wait for "backordered" to go away), and you sell no pages.

Why not add an explanation at the top of the page in one location explaining that all pages and supplements are "printed to order? Then remove the silly "backordered" notification on every single item?

There, I've solved Amos' problem of confusing their customers once again. I like Amos/Scott. I use their products in very large numbers. But I'm constantly seeing problems that seem easily solved and wondering why they don't solve them.

Drew - You hit the nail on the head. I thought that I would just wait them out and in the meantime I started exploring other options.

So, all of these Scott pages are now printed by either ink jet, or laser printers.

Does someone here know which one?

Does anyone know if Subway Stamp Shop prints their blank G & K pages; their version of the Scott International blank quadrille pages; to order?

Scott album pages look very good so whichever printing method they use looks very professional. And if you price good quality stamp album pages, you know that compared to the other major brands, Scott album pages are a real bargain. That's my little commercial for Scott/Amos.

However, one nit I might pick (besides what I said above) is that they continue to repeat earlier page mistakes much too often. Sometimes the country heading is much too high on the page. Occasionally pages have ink smudges. Sometimes an image or catalogue number is reversed with another number. A few times I've seen pages with incorrect country names -- or country names which change back and forth inexplicably (Siam-Thailand-Siam-Thailand is one). Make up your mind!

If Scott/Amos were completely in control of their in-house printing system, it would be very simple to correct these errors on the "master" copies on their computer. Since they don't correct them, I'm going to assume their system of reproducing album pages is more old-fashioned. I'd guess they have master copies of all their pages which they use (somehow) to print from, otherwise why are all their pages frozen in time with no further changes made? They don't seem to be using editable copies of their page layouts or they'd edit out the mistakes. So they must be some other kind of copy. Which seems strange and out of date.

As for Subway Stamp Shop's G&K pages, they sell both Scott blank pages for Scott International and Specialty albums, and their own blank pages. I've always assumed that Subway has a print shop print their pages. From time to time they sell off, at a discount, slightly misprinted pages (minor ink smudges) whatever that may prove. Since their pages are shrink-wrapped, labeled, and so on, it seems as if some other printing company must be doing their G&K work for them -- or would they have in-house equipment to do all that themselves? Seems unlikely to me. Final piece of evidence -- whenever I've inquired about pages of various kinds, I'm told that "the printer" is behind schedule, or that "the printer" they used to use is no longer printing their pages so they're looking for another printer, and so on. So I assume that printer must be a print shop and not a printer connected to their own computer down the hall.

Isn't the entire point of print-on-demand to eliminate backordering?

To Amos, back ordered means the same as out of stock but at least you know it is available.

I doubt they print one set at a time 'on demand' in the back room on a printer. They have records going back years to understand how many sets of something they might sell in the next year. I always assumed that print 'on demand' meant that they print sets in smaller batches.
Don

I would expect they batch even print on demand to reduce setup costs.

You may have hit on the crux of the problem. To me "print-on-demand" means having a digital file. You send it to the printer and it's done, ready to ship. No set up and no set up costs.

Makes perfect sense. A person in the printing business would know what "the magic number" is to make a job worthwhile.

I would think that they would at least keep the National in stock.