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nicklmg

LMG Staff
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  1. The response lining up with your order moving through UPS is a coincidence - we have no control over their systems, and it typically takes a number of days to get an update from them when we do reach out for clarification. I'll DM you for your order # as I'd like to look into this one further. That 2 week gap shouldn't happen, so I'd like to see what went wrong there. Regarding the item being out of stock - unfortunately sometimes there are inventory errors where our inventory count on the site doesn't line up 100% with what is actually available in the warehouse, and this typically shows up in cases like BFCM where we're doing a lot of "final sale" processing.
  2. Just want to jump in and clarify a couple things. Shipping To my understanding, we have not been printing labels in advance of shipping. It's possible that on some days our distribution team has been unable to fill all orders printed due to overestimating their outbound capability for that day, but as a matter of policy we are not printing labels beyond what can be picked and shipped that day. As mentioned in this thread, our distribution team was pre-printing a number of labels late last year during peak season and it lead to a ton of frustration, so we did our best to nip that in the bud. Our team was printing 5,000-10,000 labels at a time for convenience, which would send an initial update to our customers, but we were only able to ship 1,000-2,000 orders per day. This lead to additional delays of 5+ days for a lot of customers, which was extremely brutal. With all of that said, there are still delays between a label being created, and a shipment showing updates on tracking - especially during the holiday season. Typical process outside of peak season is: Day 1 - label printed, order picked, added to pallet for pickup. Depending on time of day, pickup may happen day 1 or day 2 Day 2 - package picked up & entered into our aggregator's system. This does not show up in tracking, as it's through a 3rd party. We've asked for additional visible tracking stages on packages for a number of months at this time, and to our understanding this is being worked on, but isn't live on their side yet Day 3 - cross-border transfer & sorting at facility in the US, then transfer to the final carrier. This does not show up in tracking, same as above. Day 4 - package scanned in final carrier's system. This DOES show up in tracking. From this stage, all updates should show up in tracking Day 5-28 (depending on region/country) - normal shipping process with semi-regular updates (eg. "scanned at local facility," "out for delivery") So effectively, even if we print & ship same day, you may see a 3-4 day delay on tracking updates under normal circumstances through our current process. When we get into holiday rush, that has the potential to balloon significantly due to delays on day 3/4 from the carrier side - we've seen anywhere from 1-7 day delays on packages being scanned into the system from UPS, USPS, and others during peak times. Support response time We have been a bit behind over the last week or so - we underestimated the amount of inquiries we'd receive around the holiday (partially due to some unforeseen circumstances like the backpack dual layer issue) and approved additional time off for some of our team, which left us a bit understaffed for the number of inquiries we received - especially given the fact that we've had 2 4-days weeks in a row due to public holidays here. With that said, our team is making a ton of progress and working through hundreds of responses each day, and they're putting in whatever OT they're comfortable with (obviously up to a cap...) in order to get replies back to as many people as quick as possible. As of today our oldest tickets are from 12/27 (6 business days), and we expect that response delay to drop significantly by early next week. Conclusion It's difficult for me to comment on individual circumstances, especially with stuff like Shop app where some of the measures we have in place may or may not push to the end user (eg. through late November and early December we had "ships by" date estimates at checkout, but I don't think we can control if that pushes to the Shop app or not) - if you have an individual concern with your order, please reach out to our support team as they'll be best-equipped to handle the issue in full. We are evaluating new opportunities around distribution to try to improve the experience through our store - nothing is off the table right now, so while we have distributed primarily out of Canada up until now, it's possible that we may add or change regions as we continue to grow. We're reaching a point where this is becoming more and more feasible due to the incredible support from the community. Our goal is always to do right by our customers. We're far from perfect, and there may be some delays or issues from time to time, but we appreciate all of the feedback we get from y'all and we're taking it to heart. PS: If you are in a situation where you've reached out to support and haven't received a reply from a ticket before 12/27, please let me know so I can look into that further. Always possible that something was missed or a mistake was made in the process, and I'd like to address that if it happened.
  3. Asking for 25 days about my order and just get ghosted.

  4. We're trying to get the actual underlying tracking issue sorted out on Wizmo's side right now as it's not impacting every order. May update the banner a bit later on but I think the support message is most important right now, team is working hard but still behind
  5. Team has been working hard clearing the backlog! I think we're sending out about 2,000 orders/day right now, over BFCM we got about 14,000 orders so it's taking a bit longer than normal to fill those orders. Should be resolved within a few days though If you haven't reached out to support yet please do. Will take us a few days to get back to you right now (team is working hard clearing a backlog there and has grown from 4 to 7 in the last few weeks) but we'll definitely look into it!
  6. If you haven't received even a shipping label yet we'll have to look into that. Some labels were printed out of order due to how they were batch printing but they should have still shipped in order. I'll DM you for detail.
  7. I mean, the EU is like 30% of our audience or something haha. So it would really suck to not serve them even if there are some headaches from time to time. Posts like yours help us improve, so thank you. We're definitely on the right path, but it's clear I need to do more to enable our team for success. We'll get there. And yes, always helps that our problem is "we have too many orders." Certainly better than having a warehouse full of 100,000 unsold screwdrivers
  8. Thanks for your detailed feedback. I've read your whole post but will reply to the TL;DR just to save space here. I'll give this suggestion directly to the distribution team, but I'm honestly not sure if this is feasible... My understanding is that the info call from Shopify lines up with label creation, and I don't think there's a way to reliably adjust that (given that we use a number of different carriers), if it's even possible without pretty significant adjustment. One thing we can definitely work on fixing is time from label creation to shipment. I know our distribution team has been pre-printing quite significantly to allow for easier sorting & picking, but this is certainly causing more frustration for customers when they get that exciting notification then see no updates for a week or more. We've asked them to cut down on pre-printing, so I'm hopeful that we can overcome that part of it moving forward. This is even more important due to the upcoming holiday season, where we always see delays for inbound shipments at carriers, which also wind up in that nebulous "label created" phase. I've asked Wizmo for greater detail on these pre-carrier stages in the past, and I've bumped that request up again with them just now. If we can add a few more phases like "departed distribution facility," "at sorting facility," "on way to carrier" etc. I think that will go a long way for transparency of information here. Something we're always working on. Unfortunately many of the highest impact tickets - which wind up being most time consuming - are unavoidable with recent circumstances eg. doublecharging EU VAT. We've been chasing our partners for over a year to resolve the issues we've seen with EU VAT being assessed improperly on a lot of our shipments, and we're FINALLY starting to see some of these problems get a resolution... but unfortunately that doesn't help the backlog that has that VAT assessed improperly, leading to thousands of adjustments being made once the shipment arrives with the customer. We're improving our automations & bulk replies, though those obviously miss the mark in some cases, and we'll be moving over to a new support system in the coming months which will give us more direct control and access to lower reply times. It's been a long time coming, and something we wish we would've done earlier. Also adding a few more roles to that team to work on more throughput and overall process improvement. Thx for catching that, we have updated the language on the store page. It's always challenging to make those projections well in advance (hence the issues with backpack shipping dates), the 3-4 week timeline was only locked in about a week ago, and even then we've taken a bit longer to ship black shaft wave 1 than expected... so it's always a moving target, unfortunately. That is the goal, and is why we didn't provide a firm expected date range for the black shaft to begin with - could've taken 3-4 weeks, or 3-4 months. It all depended on what happened once bulk production begun, and whether we were able to meet or beat our projected dates for production on screwdrivers overall. We did have some production delays with silvers, and we weren't able to reach the max output that was expected before we started production, but since we underpromised on those shipping dates we did match or beat wave 1, 2, and 3 ship dates for silver shafts in 98% of cases. That is the goal. We had basically recovered from the initial launch wave of tickets up until last week, when we started seeing 4-6x our normal daily inbound tickets - partially due to some of the concerns you've outlined here with labels being printed too early and updates not coming soon enough, as well as a number of other factors with shipping and import issues. We're making adjustments that we can - we've reassigned a few more people to that team, made offers to a number of temporary employees that we've engaged with in the past, and added a few additional roles to the hiring board. Unfortunately we aren't as nimble as we need to be, and that's something that will be top of the list for improvement moving forward. I'll see what can be done about a place in line or reply estimate, especially something automated. I expect we'll be able to provide something like that in the future, I'm just not sure how quickly we can get it together to ensure that it's done in an accurate and up-to-date way. We may explore live chat in the future, we are adding additional staff but our only priority right now is getting reply times down to 24 hours or less. Already in progress. I'll give this some thought and try to sort out what type of update makes sense here. Public post probably makes more sense than a newsletter email, but will work on something. We absolutely should have had more support staff ready to go, that's 100% a failure on my part. Scaling can be tough, and we're learning a lot along the way, but there is a lot that I could and should have done better in this case. We have doubled our support staff (with 2 more additions happening imminently), and I believe our distributor as almost doubled their daily staff as well during this period. Couple more points: Our team is shipping 2,000 orders per day with a team of ~15 right now. We've made some mistakes, but we have stuck to our proposed schedule for shipping silver shaft drivers. We knew we'd be capable of doing that, and we have. As mentioned above, we're making mistakes with pre-printing some labels too early, but we've met or beat those shipping date estimates in about 98% of cases. A post on the forum would have similar limitations, but I definitely should be doing a better job of keeping info up to date on the site. We utilize Wizmo because the biggest complaint we had from customers for years was the cost of our shipping (since we show real rates, while many brands effectively hide the "real" cost of their shipping in inflated product pricing). The only negotiating power you get with carriers is scale, so the way to improve on that major customer complaint was to find an aggregator, and Wizmo came very highly recommended from some close & trusted partners. And to be fair to them, they've been an awesome partner for us as well. The issue right now is that our recent growth has even broken some of their processes... we went from a max # of orders of like 25,000 in a month previously to almost 100,000 (obviously shipping less than that per month). Our latest invoices have literally broken Wizmo's templates, with some digits half-hidden because the total value doesn't even fit in their "TOTAL" cell lol. The last few months have been unprecedented for us, our distributor, and our carrier. We're all doing our best to make improvements, but I totally agree that we haven't done enough. Again, I really appreciate the feedback, and we're working on most of the points you brought up here. I know I've done a poor job of executing on a lot of what we've experienced in the last few months, but all I can say is that we're learning lessons and trying to get things back on track to provide an excellent experience to everyone who buys with us.
  9. Flagged to the support team, someone will reach out! Sorry for the delay there, we've had another massive influx of tickets in the last couple weeks. Getting some additional folks on it and adding to the team once more haha... thanks for your patience.
  10. Unfortunately we did encounter a couple issues with Shopify's edit function moving some orders out of the proper shipping pool (I think this impacted about 180 orders in total), we've audited wave 1 & are working through a wave 2 audit right now. Sorry that it took longer than expected to get this fixed! Black shaft drivers are supposed to start shipping next week according to our production team so hoping for the best with that!!
  11. Yeah truly... they used to be amazing for Int'l even, which was the lifeblood of our carrier's business in the early days. Then they made some changes and really seem to have screwed a few things up... I've always heard that USPS was never going to be sustainable/profitable (or even nearly break-even) the way it was set up before - not sure if there's validity to that - but seems like enough people with influence felt like something had to change and here we are...
  12. We've recently swapped from USPS to UPS for a lot of US shipments. USPS has become significantly more costly over the last few years (since about 2019 if I recall correctly, something with the new postmaster taking them out of some international accord if I recall correctly) and their reliability since the pandemic started has been... mixed, to say the least. We'll continue evaluating options as we go, but for now UPS makes more sense than USPS in a lot of cases from what we've seen.
  13. Haha we've seen this a few times... it looks like Shopify's tracking is categorizing "Redmond, WAshington" as "Redmond, Western Australia" somehow. Rest assured, your package has not taken an extreme detour hahaha
  14. Absolutely lol. Yeah 25,000 backpacks and 20,000 screwdrivers arriving within a week was... well, it was an adventure for our distribution team. I have nothing but appreciation for those folks, they work as hard as we could ever ask them to. I can totally see why people are annoyed. I'm sure I would be if I was on the other side as well. But I really appreciate that people are taking the time to see it from our perspective, and listening to our updates & explanations. Definitely never trying to make excuses for this, we should (and will) be better. Just excited to see that people are liking everything when they do get their long-awaited products in their hands
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