For many years Somerford Mini Limited traded without providing catalogues for their customers. A strange situation you may think for a company selling products via mail order.
Peter Hines M.D. knew this was not ideal, but always stated there was no point in producing a catalogue unless it was fully comprehensive and could also be used as a valuable resource – something that had never been achieved before within the industry.
The reasons for holding back with this idea were limited resources and finances. However as the Company grew, this situation changed and in 2003 work comments.
As I am sure you can appreciated, this was a monumental task which took 4 years and 10’s of thousands of pounds to complete. It is now the benchmark Mini catalogue and resource tool. Something that we as a Company are immensely proud of.
Not content with this, the next stage was to make the catalogue fully inter-active within our e-shop. Another massive and daunting task!
However work has started as you can see and is ongoing. Again this is slow and costly.
Where a section of the catalogue has not been made interactive, we have provided .pdf documents for customers. You are able to look up part numbers and contact us for the price and availability.
When the website was first launched you were able to access these but not download them. This brought about a number of complaints from some customers. We listened to these comments and then made the .pdf documents available as free downloads.
This provoked even more strong comments and complaints – which is quite upsetting.
Because of this we have decided to provide the .pdf’s both ways: To view on the site or to download for a small charge, rather like i tunes. Alternatively you can purchase a C.D. rom containing all of our 12,000 products. One of the advantages of this is a much, much faster download time.
I would ask that you remain patient and keep revisiting the site. More sections of the catalogue will be added to the e-shop just as they are complete – it will be worth waiting for!
I hope this explains things and thanks for visiting the site.
Peter Hines
