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Archive | 2024

Bulk inventory purchases

A few people have expressed interest in purchasing the remaining Revere Ware parts inventory but a deal has not yet been struck.  Here is a breakdown of what I currently have.

My preference would be to sell ALL the remaining parts to a single buyer and I will give much better pricing if this is the case.  I would be able to provide support in the future for additional manufacturing runs of parts as necessary.

Please contact me if you are interested.

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RevereWareParts is dead; long live RevereWareParts

I took the summer off hoping come fall and with some traveling under my belt I would be motivated to reopen the store and continue to sell these parts.  Unfortunately, the summer brought some major opportunities in my other businesses, and I just don’t have a lot of energy to keep this one going as well.  Additionally, my fulfillment center informed me just before summer started that they were retiring their API and I had to switch to an new one, which would cost many thousands of dollars to have developers handle.  That helped me make the decision to permanently close the door. 🙁  I know many of you have been waiting for the store to reopen at the end of summer, but alas, it is not to be.

I’ve had a good run, providing replacement parts for 15 years, selling around 150,000 parts to almost 100,000 customers.

And answering I can’t even begin to guess how many questions that people have about Revere Ware, the history of Revere Ware, problems with their Revere Ware, etc.  I’ve tried to just help people wherever possible.  Add to that over 500 blog posts on all things Revere Ware.

This doesn’t need to be the end for Revere Ware replacement parts, I just need to pass the torch to someone else, as for me, the chapter is closed.

I have many tens of thousands of replacement parts still that I am happy to sell to someone that wants to continue to offer them for sale.  You can even copy my product listings which I will continue to leave up.

If you are interested, please note that I will be selling a minimum of 5,000 parts at a time.  If someone wants to buy everything I have at once, I don’t mind. 🙂

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Last chance to purchase parts from our site before out summer break!

Wednesday June 5th will be the last day to purchase replacement parts from our website before we break for the entire summer.

As mentioned in a previous post, we are taking a break to spend time with family and travel, our first such break in 15 years of business.

Until supplies run out, you can purchase a limited variety of our parts on Amazon.com, but those are expected to run out in the next month or two.  After the Amazon inventory is gone, we will not be continuing to sell our parts on Amazon.com.

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Our store will be closed for the summer, starting June 5th

After 15 years of selling replacement parts, providing answers to any and all Revere Ware related questions, and meticulously building a sizable stable of Revere Ware related memorabilia and information, we are nearing the end of serving the Revere Ware community.

We will be closing the store entirely by the end of 2024.  We will also be taking a pause on sales and responding to emails over most of the summer, in order to do some travel and have quality family time without interruption.

The last orders we will accept before our summer closure will be on June 5th.

The last customer emails we will answer before shutting down for the summer will be on June 13th. 

Post-2024, we would very much like to see someone else continue to provide this service.  If you are interested in taking on this business and are prepared to make a reasonable offer, please contact us.

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Saying goodbye to Amazon

We recently sent what will likely be our last shipment of parts to the Amazon marketplace, for at least a while, as we get closer to our summer sales pause.

If you wish to purchase any of our parts from Amazon, you may want to do so sooner than later; many of them currently have less than a months worth of inventory remaining.

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The plague of Amazon return theft

I’m glad someone is finally reporting on the phenomenon.

Amazon’s liberal no-questions-asked return policy is, at best, prone to mistakes, and at worst, prone to abuse.

It works like this: someone orders and expensive item from Amazon and then returns it, but substitutes something cheaper in the return box, and claims they returned the part as they should have.  The buyer then keeps the expensive item, or, in the case of organized theft rings, they sell it on another marketplace, or even Amazon.com itself, to turn it into cash.

The biggest part of this problem is that Amazon will often blindly put things back into inventory without even the most cursory of inspections or validations, so the merchant may not find about the theft until some time later when a customer complains they got the wrong thing.  If this happens a lot, Amazon may even suspend the seller due to “excessive problems”, to add insult to injury.  But it gets worse, as Amazon’s seller support is notoriously poor, as you can tell by our difficulties with the hijacking of our listings.

We’ve had some very strange things returned instead of our products at times.  I presume because our parts aren’t incredibly expensive, people aren’t intentionally substituting cheaper goods for our parts.  But they often return damaged parts or parts that are missing something.  Amazon simply does very little checking of returned items, and it causes all kinds of problems.  A single item that is returned damaged or missing parts can then go to several other customers in the next few months, leading to bad reviews and excessive complaints.

As a seller, I can’t see us continuing to stay with Amazon unless they significantly improve the return process, to the benefit of sellers, and their seller support.

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PO’d at the PO

Oh, USPS, it is hard to love you, or even like you.  We seem to have more and more packages going AWOL.

And while for years the USPS has been plagued by lower volumes of first class mail, the drop box at our local main post office might indicate otherwise.  This is what I found as I went to drop off a customer package this morning.

We aren’t talking about a small box.

More often than not, this is how I find it, full to the brim.

While USPS is still the cheapest option for us to ship, it does come with drawbacks.

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Brand hijacking on Amazon; beginning of the end?

The latest threat to this business is unsavory Amazon sellers hijacking our product listings.  Here is what a normal listing on Amazon looks like.  Notice that we are listed a the brand.

Here is one of the (so far) six hijacked product listings.

The product listings haven’t been altered yet, but I have no doubt this game is about replacing the product I sell with another one on the same listing, and tricking people into believing the ratings and reviews are for the new product.

With the items now associated with another brand, we have to “ask for permission” to be able to send products for sale, so this prevents us from shipping additional inventory.

The only way Amazon allows people to prevent this is by registering a trademark and creating an official brand on Amazon with the trademark.  Sounds simple but the last trademark application I was involved with took several years, multiple submissions, and tens of thousands in attorneys fees; they aren’t as simple as they seem.

This doesn’t bode well for the future my of selling Revere Ware replacement parts.  As dealing with Amazon (excessive returns, customers with attitude that don’t bother reading anything, poor customer service, ridiculous policies, removed listings, hijacked listings) becomes more and more of a hassle, I just can’t see continuing to sell items there.  I’ve already stopped selling a half dozen of our parts there due to excessive returns.  If our few big sellers get hijacked and we can no longer send inventory, that’s probably the end of Amazon selling.

Without the Amazon sales volume, the rest of the business doesn’t make a lot of sense for the effort.

We’ll see how it goes this time around with their support.  If I am unable to get any help in this, it is probably the beginning of the end for this business.  I can imagine winding things down by the end of this year.  Being able to take a vacation without answering customer service emails might be a nice change. 🙂

So consider this a warning shot, our replacement parts might not be available much longer.  Stay tuned.

Update 2/12/24

Oh what a mess Amazon’s support is.  A case filed under one issue type they told me to file it under another issue type.  Then that case they told me it would be transferred to another group that could help and I would be contacted but wasn’t.  Then I opened a new case and they told me to file under the account health dashboard | listing policy violation. This approach managed to get three of the six listings transferred back to my brand ownership, but the other three just kept coming back as “no violation found”.  I am now six replies deep in another filed case trying to get them to get a clue.  For example, a typical response from Amazon:

We cannot make the suggested brand change to ASIN B017GRFQBW B0170TXUNM B0170TEWUW.

Kindly note that the detail page associated with this ASIN is controlled by the brand owner. Any product-related information on this ASIN must be submitted by the brand owner.

Right, that is exactly the problem I had to remind them for the umpteenth time.  So I am still in limbo on three of my listings, hoping for the best.

 

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Revere Ware find of the week: shiny new 12 qt stock pot on eBay

While this large stock pot isn’t from the vintage era, in my opinion the thicker copper bottom isn’t quite as critical in the stock pots as they are more than likely to be used for liquid items where “spreading the heat” isn’t quite as important.  While there are fair number of stock pots larger than 8 quarts on eBay, the vast majority of them are 8 quarts or less.  And to find a brand new one in the 12 quart size .. I’m not sure I’ve seen one in this size and this condition before.

So if you want to add a nice shiny trophy pieced to your collection, this might be the one for you.  The price is not unreasonable for what it is.

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