Good UK parts supplier?

[twopart]

midland

bubblefish and matydred you guys should grow up a bit.
midland are fine like and other business there are only so many parts you can stock at once to satisfy everyone.
i would love to see you guys run a business like they do and you supply everything that every single customer rings up for and supply it all straight away.

think about it guys before opening your mouths

[Stuart]

I've never had any issues with any stores be it skyline or midland.

The problem you have is systems. From what I can see.

Midland, Revolution are actinic
Perl Based getting dated (server and vendor based)

RealRaptors, Fastlads are oscommerce
Free Software and was very hackable in the past especially when the backend didn't even come secured with password access and you found that many used .htaccess to secure it. But its backend to me was very poor.
(Server based only / .php)

Skyline / RcHeliaddict Store / RcMarket are x-cart
(Server based only / .php) backend secured off the shelf, paid for quailty script.

PHP format as massively grown over the years and relys on a mysql database to run from. ALL .php sites have vunerablities but like vBulletin, xcart is heavily supported and any lose holes get fixed very quick.

[IMG]http://static.php.net/www.php.net/images/stats/phpstats-200707.png[/IMG]


When running a server based software it becomes difficult at tracking stock accurately when you have customers walk in to as the till doesn't talk to the website and tell it what its sold. If you ran a webstore only then exact stock control would be a doddle as you won't have the customer calling in to buy. The only way round it would be to create two systems the primary is the web and the secondary is the shop and you'd have to run a script to update the site every set times. But doing this again is not easy unless you have a automated shop system that can also track stock and export data in a format that can imported to the web side.

To be honest if I had a true shop as such I wouldn't even have a till I would let the cutsomers come in and have a couple of PC's on hand and let the customers select what they want and pay for it via the site, print off thier invoice and collect at the counter. (aka Argo's style).

Even some of the big stores don't manage thier stock as a whole and run two stocks one for store and one for the web.