Suppliers out of pocket after E-Store demise - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Suppliers out of pocket after E-Store demise

By Jeanne-Vida Douglas, ZDNet Australia
October 04, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Suppliers-out-of-pocket-after-E-Store-demise/0,139023166,120260927,00.htm

The recent passage of E-Store into voluntary administration has come as no surprise to many of the company's suppliers whose concerns regarding tardy payments have only been confirmed by today's events.

Fiona Dicker, managing director of Dicker Data told ZDNet Australia she had had difficulty extracting payment from the company since they first entered into business dealings with them in January this year.

-It was always difficult to get paid, they were always late with payment," Dicker said. -It wasn't a recent thing, they had always been slow."

Dicker is now faced with the onerous task of securing payment for E-Store's bad debt.

-Thankfully most of it was insured, but we will still be out by about ten percent," she said.

Others, such as Rohan Levy director of former E-Store supplier MPZoo managed to escape the creditors' list, managing to extract payment from the troubled company at the eleventh hour.

-I began to suspect things were going wrong when it became totally impossible to get through to them," he said. -They had made significant changes to their terms of payment and their staff numbers were dwindling."

Levy confirmed he had made multiple attempts to contact E-Store in recent weeks, but found that the means of communication were being closed down one by one.

-We tried phoning the office, the direct lines of the sales staff, Steven Spilly the MD but no one was answering and the voice mail boxed were full so we couldn't leave a message. They weren't responding to e-mail, and they even ended up turning the fax off," Levy said.

However, others such as Ingram Micro's Steve Rust were caught totally off guard by the news.

-No I hadn't heard they were in trouble, and at this stage I can't make any comment until I have spoken with my financial staff," said Rust.

Disclaimer: ZDNet Australia has a content relationship with E-Store.