Michael Fleisher
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Your line is open
Yes, sure, Neely. Yes, thanks for the question. We carry a big selection, as you know, 7 million items, and I think some of the other folks mentioned Walmart, Home Depot, these are all folks who carry a big assortment of items, along with Amazon. So our approach is actually to be very thorough in worrying about the safety the products we sell. In order to do that, we do a few things. One is all our suppliers, we have supplier agreements with them, we have indemnification agreements with them, we have certificates of insurance from them, we have detailed product information which specifies down to the various regulatory bodies whether they be local, state or federal, what pieces they comply with, or if items don’t comply, so that we can take the appropriate steps in terms of whether we offer them or not. And that’s how we are able to make sure that the products are of high quality, and meet all the guidelines. The other thing we do though, that not many people do, is that we do not source items directly from the factories that they are made overseas. So we are sourcing from folks who are the distributors and the actual product designers, who are generally American and European companies who are then sourcing in Asia. So we have an additional layer of QA, QC that a lot of the other retailers who are directly sourcing may not have, except through their own QC personnel, who would be on site. And so that’s our approach, it’s been pretty thorough, it’s worked quite well. In terms of that article, that refers to laminate wood flooring, and that’s a category that’s been featured prominently in the press because of Lumber Liquidators, who I think had a fairly extensive problem of their own sourced product. And for us it’s important to know, laminate flooring’s a really small category, so laminate flooring, it’s 0.2% of our sales, so that’s 2/100 of a percent of our sales, which is about – the number have is just under $400,000 year to date in that whole category. A lot of that product comes from large producers like Armstrong and Mohawk, and so Ark, for example, which the brand that article mentioned, we have had 10 orders from Ark in total in total for this type of product, and similar to what we always do, we made sure that the product complied, and then there’s a point in time where the manufacturer actually told us that they were discontinuing the product, so actually pulled it at that point, which was even before the New York Times got interested in the product. So we would like to be very thorough there, and that process which we set up and honed over the years, we think has worked very well, had millions and millions of orders, and we’ve been able to really avoid problems.