Just to provide some information in order to respond to recent points raised.
In response to the specific Sennheiser issue raised here, it should be noted that as a company we work closely with Sennheiser. The details of this relationship and our supply chain are clearly not up for discussion publicly, and we ask people to respect this. What matters is that we're able to offer a sensible price while respecting Sennheisers' reputation for a quality product. We have the necessary contracts in place with UK-based servicing agents to ensure our customers have warranty support. We also collect, repair/replace, and return for free.
Insofar as stocking goes, we always try to have Sennheiser available as they are one of the top choices of headset. We have never knowingly advertised a discontinued Sennheiser online. The recently discontinued ones are HME-43 and HME-100. These should have been withdrawn immediately. We have contacted CaptainChaos981 via OM as we have been unable to locate the order so far. We're sorry to hear there may have been an issue with this being listed and sold. If this were to happen, we'd normally try our level best to secure last-stocks of any item this happened to. There are normally a few units available somewhere in the world once a product is discontinued!
We don't sell an item then 'hope' to get hold of it. We'd be interested to know who said this! At the end of the day, we're trying to build a solid business. It is designed to distribute products and serve customers. There'd be no sense in building a business without a robust supply chain behind it.
We aim to hold stock on all popular items. The site is updated with stock-positions manually. In the interests of professionalism we have never mentioned any other aviation supplier. But there are occasions where an item may be drop-shipped no matter what the company. It's a reflection of good supply chain arrangements. This simply allows us to provide an item more quickly when requested, especially if we're in an oversold position.
The aim is to be very careful on what we stock. This is what enables us to be competitive on price. We don't have sales. Products should be sensibly priced at all times. We work closely with and respect all our suppliers which include all main aviation distributors worldwide. We are actually sole UK distributors for 9 brands and growing.
We used drop-shipping more when the company was younger, but now we have a greater despatch capability and desire to fulfill the majority of orders in house. This means control over each order, ability to provide tracking, and observe special instructions. We use UPS at no cost to the customer, which we hope is good value.
With respect to the Lightspeed Ear Seals mentioned earlier. We're sorry these were/are so late. We did on this occasion refund the monetary value of the ear seals, but as these were offered free, we'd not normally do this as the offer would be open to abuse. Lightspeed ear seals do last a long time- obviously they'll degrade before the headset will, so we hoped the offer of free replacements would be well received after 1-2 years of flying when the seals might start to become shabby.