Hi guys, we are trying to communicate more with you all, and even though I may not have the information I wanted to share with you yet, it’s better to tell you all anyways.
- Shipments in EU that have not been delivered and are either with DHL still or have been returned to sender:
These are still being investigated by our forwarder. What’s sad is that despite us telling them we have issues with these, like on a sheet of 101 tracking labels that were returned to sender or duplicate tracking numbers, they just came back with “answers” indicating that 100 were “delivered successfully”, and that only 1 potentially had a real issue. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Instead I called our representative in China, Betty, and explained to her why these results of being “delivered successfully” did not apply to our shipments in most cases but to the previous use of that tracking number! So now the reused tracking numbers were even wreaking havoc in their own systems, and they still were failing to see that. I sent Betty the list again, this time complete with clickable links directly to the tracking page of DHL DE where in fact they have to input a postal code because the site itself said
Several items are attributed to this shipment number . Please limit your search by entering the recipient’s postal code.
So tomorrow she will have the forwarder come to her office and they’re going to go through the list one by one until they realize the magnitude of their mistake. Which will hopefully lead to them taking the proper steps to rectify the situation.
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EU shipments returned to the German warehouse:
I sent a list of addresses I had confirmed by the backers through their tickets (thanks for that!) to the forwarder asking them to please resend those. Instead of them starting that process after me telling them at least three times since that that was what they should do, all I got back was another “results” sheet, saying they were successfully delivered! “TO YOU GUYS” I cried out loud, but just wrote them again asking them to please just resend them. No action yet as far as I know after a full 10 days. -
Exotic countries: we are still looking at other shipping methods, but we are very careful, as we don’t want the shipments to fail and have to retry multiple ways like happened with the Russian deliveries.
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Ticket response: I now have 2200 tickets assigned to me that are about this campaign’s logistics, ranging from “what’s my Backerkit ID?” to “when will you ship” to “the tracking number is not working”. This last one has again resurfaced in a new fresh batch of tickets as we got tracking labels for a new shipment and uploaded these to Backerkit, lots of people who aren’t on the forum or never read the FAQ regarding the shipping expecting their tracking to go live as soon as they got it or within two days.
So as I can’t handle all of these tickets by myself, I now have another colleague helping me with these, besides his regular technical support tickets, so not 100% of his time. We decided to also look at the shipping issues from the fulfillment side, as the tickets may have duplicate issues and some may have been solved already by a successful shipment or by no longer being relevant. But we have to still go through them all to find the ones that matter most and are still open. On Monday I worked for 18 out of 25 hours on these issues and slept about 2 in total. So you are important to us and we are doing our outmost best to handle these cases, in which even our forwarder who’s supposed to be an expert can’t seem to figure out what’s happening. It’s all not rocket science perhaps, but we can’t just open a can of people to answer these as ultimately the real solutions still have to come from the forwarder.
Positive from all of this since last week is that we are making progress, it’s not a standstill even though the outcome for you guys is still the same as in no projector coming your way yet. We are making progress and will soon have solid answers for you, I’m just reluctant to predict what or when as I’ve been proven wrong by factors beyond my control before.
Ivo