I have an account with Williams amd think its a great set up. But can someone Confirm please?
i thought it was for Gas safe registered only?
seems if you have a business you can get an account and buy boilers or any other gas appliance.
is this true @Raystafford
thanks.
Hi Paul
We limit ourselves to "Trade" customers, but bear in mind that heating is only a part of our business, and we deal with lots of other trades as well.
Which begs the question "what makes someone trade?".
Our first approach to that question is to reverse it. We can usually recognise a "retail" customer when we see them, and we send them on their way with directions to B&Q.
Our next question is "is this customer purchasing an item in pursuance of their main business or trade?". If the answer to that question is "yes" then we will generally deal with them, unless we have other reasons not to.
This leads to some grey areas. For example, an accountant who has a couple of buy-to-let flats likes to style himself as a "property developer". We would not consider him trade and would not sell him anything - not even a tap.
At the other end of the spectrum, one of our longest standing customers started doing up buy-to-lets 30 years ago, and now has 150+ properties. He is clearly a professional, and employs qualified sparks and GSRs to do his maintenance work, but prefers to purchase the materials himself. We see no reason not to treat him the same way as the local council, housing association, MOD, University and other major property owners who we deal with on the same basis.
A fair amount is left to the branch managers discretion, on the understanding that there are two general rules:
1) If in doubt, ask for further proof. Knowingly selling to a retail customer has the same disciplinary consequences as stealing money from the till.
2) If you are worried about safety, err on the side of losing the sale. This would apply to the sale of any potentially dangerous product, not just gas.
We recently had a case where a guy who had been a customer for 30 years allowed his registration to lapse and appeared in the local paper after being prosecuted for working illegally. After this, one of the lads on the counter called me because he had asked for a price on a boiler. I had known this guy since I was in my 20s, but still had to have that awkward conversation "sorry mate, but unless you are going to re-qualify, we aren't going to sell you any gas stuff."
On our website, we have to validate trade status in a different way, so we use the GSR thing (we pay them a tidy sum of money to link to the Gas Safe database) because it is a sure-fire check that we can do automatically, even at night time or weekends.
For customers who don't validate that way, we have a manual process of checking them out. Our rejection rate is not massive, but about 20% of non-GSR applicants get told to jog on.
Our aim is to:
1) Protect trade margins where possible, accepting that the internet makes this hard
2) Not waste valuable trade customer time waiting in line behind numpties
We don't try to act as the industry policeman, although we do like to sleep at night.
