Addressing order update communication delays
I will be taking some time away (couple of hours) from working on watches to formalize my “production” schedule. I will then do the following:
* As a temporary measure I will e-mail everyone with an outstanding order with a PDF file attached with a copy of your sales order. I will list a very rough estimate of ship date. This may take up to the rest of the week since there are a number of orders and I will try to take the time to make the estimates as realistic as possible.
* As a more long term measure I have contacted a programmer that will be writing a customer interface for me that will allow you to look up your sales order number and see the current status of the order based on the production schedule that I will organize. A web based solution is ideal since e-mails can be trapped by SPAM filters and PDF files can be corrupted when they are sent.
* My long-term hope is that my software provider (web store guys) will take up my suggestion and allow customers to view their open orders online through the account history section of the site. Currently one can only see orders that have been invoiced and completed which isn’t terribly useful for me any way. I got a non-commital we’ll get to it when I mentioned it to them two weeks ago.
This was going to be addressed after the current backlog was worked down more but given the feedback that I have been receiving from a number of customers I will be moving this to pretty much the top of my list of priorities.
Thanks for everyone’s patience.
May 15th
Our web site may be down. During a routine server update this evening I ran into some technical/software problems that may have created an error on our server. I can not access the site and in all likelyhood I am not the only one at this time. I won’t be able to address the issue until Tuesday morning.
Orders placed up until 11 pm EST May 15th seem to have downloaded properly. If anything is missing I won’t know more information until I talk to our support people Tuesday.
Also I may not have access to e-mail now. I can’t log into my e-mail account so there is a chance that e-mails sent to my accounts may bounce although, again I won’t know more until Tuesday.
Sorry for the inconvenience.