In this Business English Pod lesson, we’ll be focusing on the language of taking an order and discussing standard terms, such as delivery time, payment method, and so on.
The listening takes us back to the Foxtrot showroom in Las Vegas. As you’ll recall, Foxtrot is the American distributor for Viva, an Italian clothing, or Apparel, manufacturer. Bill is a buyer for a chain of department stores, who has now decided to purchase from Viva. Foxtrot representative Adrianne and her Viva partner, Mario, discuss Bill’s order with him.
Before we get started, it’s important to emphasize that this conversation is not really a negotiation, but rather a situation where most parts of the deal are already agreed to. So, in this episode, we’ll be studying vocabulary for summarizing the terms of a typical commercial order and learning phrases for managing customer-vendor relationships, for example by reassuring the customer to build goodwill.
Listening Questions
1) When he says, “We operate on a narrow window for deliveries,” what does Bill mean?
2) The term chargeback refers to all or part of a fee being refunded, or returned, to the buyer. For what situation is Bill quite “strict on chargebacks?”
3) When would Bill like the first delivery to be made, and why?
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very good lesson, it’s a pity that the lady in the the listening had a flu: quite sifficult to understand what she said; records should maybe be registred by people with a clear voice. Final result is anyway very good
@ Silvia
I think you’re referring to the old version of the recording. We redid the dialog back in December and published a new podcast MP3, which you can download from this page (right-click on the ‘download’ link below the audio player.
Incidentally, I remember the original recording well – it wasn’t just Christy (the female voice) who had a cold, I think just about everyone in that session was sick! When you publish new lessons every week, you don’t always have the luxury of making everything perfect the first time. BUT we do go back and redo recordings if there’s a serious problem, as was the case with this episode.