We often hear stories from customers about difficulties they experienced ordering from the major online Judaica vendors. Today we received an order from a customer from Coral Gables, Florida who added the following tallit horror story to the comments field:
I received the worst service from [XXX] Judaica. I first ordered one tallit that a month later I was informed was out of stock. Then, I placed an order for another tallit which I was told today, over a month after I ordered it, that it was out of stock when I was originally told that it was available. This tallit will be a late anniversary and wedding present for my fiance, and I’m so glad that your shop can assist me.
This type of experience is not so uncommon. The reason is that it’s quite a challenge to keep an adequate supply of tallits in stock. Tallit sellers have to offer a very large selection of tallit styles, and each style may come in two or three or more color combinations, and on top of that most tallits come in three or four — or sometimes even eight or nine — sizes.
Not even the major tallit distributors in Israel have all the tallits in the wholesale catalog available at all times. Neither do the manufacturers. Mishkan Hatchelet has a very large factory in Be’er Sheva and over a dozen factory outlet stores around the country. They have an internal computer network to keep track of stock at all of the various factory outlet stores. And it’s not at all uncommon for them to be unable to locate a certain tallit in a certain size at any of those outlet stores.
The major online Judaica sellers like World of Judaica, aJudaica, Eichler’s, Judaica Webstore and Ahuva, to name a few, work with a very large number of suppliers and are not in a position to go chasing after a certain tallit. Those that are located in the US are even less likely to be able to get a hard-to-procure item quickly, because they rely on large periodic shipments from Israel.
This can be a challenge for us, as well, but over the years we’ve established working relations with a number of tallit suppliers, so that when one of them is unable to procure the items we need, the next day we contact another supplier on our list. We’re also set up to get deliveries from suppliers twice a week, so there’s rarely much lag time involved.
