You realize there is nothing "awesome" about that .. In fact that's someone who followed through with his end of the agreement and sent you money and supported your small business only to get royally screwed and is now resorting to selling the unused item for less than 1/2 of what he paid.. You would think one would be apologetic or sympathetic at the minimum..
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Like this:
"Im sorry your product took longer than expected to arrive. Hopefully you will give us an opportunity in the future to get it right."
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay, tho it was not in our control we take full responsibility and are taking steps to ensure a better customer experience"
Even like this:
" Im really sorry! "
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Somehow i think it's me..
Maybe im looking at it the wrong way..
maybe in your next video which i found *.extremely entertaining.. you can add a test dummy representing a paying customer like af_newbie and just beat the living **** out of em and then with a mental patient ear to ear grin on your face you spit right in his face and look directly into the camera and say -->> " you piece of ****, i got your money and i could give a **** less about your experience or whether you get the product you paid for in a timely manner or not! "
Now that would be awesome eh! or am i not doing it right?..
That's not entirely correct. I sympathise with people like joshvette and wobbzzz who chose a slow shipping method in error - I have corrected that by re-shipping their parcels via EMS at our expense, and we will figure out what to do once the original parcels arrive. C'est la vie.
af_newbie's case is a different one. Not only did he willingly and knowingly choose a slow shipping method, but before his item left the country he opened a PayPal dispute. During the course of that dispute the transit timelines were reiterated over and over again. He even had the opportunity to upgrade to EMS at that point, which he did not take up. He closed the case of his own volition, accepting that it would arrive within the stipulated transit time, which at that stage was (and I'm quoting from what we told him in the comments of the case) - "Shipping via regular surface mail typically takes up to 6 weeks (longer if there are import delays at the destination country)". Sure, those were naive timelines, and that's why (per the recommendation on the previous thread) we adjusted the timelines to 6-10+ weeks, up to a maximum of 13 weeks.
So when he came on the thread spewing vitriol because he received it, it's really hard to be apologetic. I said "awesome" because it's the first Canadian surface mail shipment that has indicated they've received it, so it gives us a baseline. I won't engage on his other comments because they don't warrant engagement.
We can talk around this issue at length, but basically nobody (including us) expected the surface mail parcels to literally take 10 weeks to the US, especially when we're seeing like 5 weeks to the UK. Had we known it was going to be that bad, we would never have even put that up as an option, or we would have put some ridiculous transit timeline like 4 months just to make sure nobody chooses it. I definitely sympathise with those who are waiting, and I cannot apologise enough that the "or longer" bit in our surface mail estimates has ended up being "definitely frikkin longer, in fact way, way longer than you or I realise".
Respectfully, I do not think it will be productive or useful for me to apologise at length in every post, though. I think it will end up sounding less than genuine, because everyone wants a solution, they want action. An apology doesn't get their order to them faster. My focus at the moment is on seeing how we can ensure that this doesn't happen in future for anyone, by improving and streamlining our processes, and by making fundamental changes to our logistics model. Does this solve the problem for customers whose orders have already shipped? No, of course not, but we have no choice but to learn from the rocky past and move forward.
