I just want to vent a bit. One of my business I own is wedding photography. I had a wedding on Sept 10th. I suggested to my client that for a guest sign in book, they should use their engagement pictures to make a photo sign in book. I ended up choosing Adorama to make my book, and I also ordered a large print for the client. The order was placed on Aug 30th. I paid for the expedited Service (it says 2 days on the website), and 2nd day air shipping. It said estimated delivery to be Sept 6th, Tuesday.
On Tuseday the 6th, I still haven't gotten any shipping info. So I called... they told me the order was finished friday, and it will be shipped THAT day. I understood that monday was a holiday, they said I'll have it be thursday. And I will get tracking info by mail shortly. Wednesday... nothing, I called. They said, it was actually finished Tusday, and it was "probably" shipped, but she'll ask her manager for tracking info. They also said that the expedited Service can take up to 5 days and that was the 5th business day so they technically didn't go over their expedited service timeline.
Thursday Morning, I called again... they finally verbally game me 1 tracking number code. Which it say 2 packages will be arriving end of day on the 9th.
Well... At 5pm westcoast, I got 1 package, the large print. I called UPS, they said even tho it said 2 packages, there was only 1 tracking code means only 1 package was picked up. So I had to tell my client on their wedding day that they won't have a guest book.
I called Adorama, told em calmly about the whole situation..., no apologies, "let me find out what happened, I'll call you right back..." That was yesterday morning.
Nactos wrote:
The order was placed on Aug 30th. I paid for the expedited Service (it says 2 days on the website), and 2nd day air shipping. It said estimated delivery to be Sept 6th, Tuesday.
Firstly please accept my apologies for the frustration and inconvenience which was caused. I appreciate that I'm unable at this point to change your experience but I'd welcome the opportunity to look into what went wrong and why, so we can learn lessons for the future.
However, I will need your order number - could you please email me: [email protected]
BTW not sure if this is relevant, but looking at the Pix website, I see that expedited service for photobooks appears to be 2-4 days, rather than 2 days (and prints is 1 day).
Once again my apologies and I look forward to hearing back from you.
PS Not sure which you'll see first, so I've also responded to your posting on POTN
Utterly unacceptable. I can not imagine what it's like for me to tell my client: "I am very sorry to inform you that, due to some issues with the lab I use, you won't have a guest book for your guests to sign."
It only take once to screw up an urgent order like this.
Not that I'm trying to be accusatory, but can you explain why you waited until Aug 30 to order a book that you needed before Sept 10, and that the intervening 10 days (Aug 31 through Sept 9) included a major US holiday?
If you placed the order during business hours, did you call to confirm exactly when the book would be completed and ship? Did you call before you placed the order? Extremely critical timelines like this often require a lot of up-front work. When I've needed something ASAP, I tend to call the lab prior to placing the order, to ask how I must place it to ensure getting it by the time needed, then call after the order is uploaded to verify that I've done it correctly.
If the customer wanted the book and only placed the order on the 30th, I would have advised that given the major holiday, there may be some issues with fulfillment. I hope you advised your customer accordingly.
Agree that you waited *way* too long to order the book. My last time-critical book order to Adorama (in 2010) was placed on January 22 and had to be in my hands by February 12. I made sure they were aware of this fact and asked them, via phone, to use whatever production and shipping methods were needed to accomplish it. I got the book a day or two early.
You can argue that you were misled by their website and perhaps you were to a degree. But if you waited until only a week before you needed something for a wedding and then ordered it without checking to see if it was even possible to produce and ship in time to meet your deadline, you need to accept your share of the blame in this one.
Ordering a time sensitive, must-have product from the East Coast when you live on the West Coast with a national holiday wedged in-between is like rolling the dice. Was there no access to book binders or local labs on the West Coast? I guess I wouldn't have "suggested" a guest book and print in that time frame unless it was either in-stock, or available nearby. ...... and the (name your supplier) followed by the "Never again" comment is getting real old here.
While I agree that the OP may have left ordering his materials a little late, he doesn't deserve to be called a whiner.
He placed an order for a product and was expecting the product to be delivered within the timeframe specified on the seller's site. The seller is the one that didn't fulfill their end of the bargain- not the buyer.
By any reasonable standard of business, he screwed up by mismanaging his client's needs. Unless the couple was highly Catholic and the bride was highly pregnant, the wedding is never planned at such late date. Either the book should have been ordered earlier, or the client told of the risks involved in placing that order in that way from that supplier at that date. The OP clearly blew it as a businessperson, and is in denial about that fact. So he's aggressively blaming the supplier for everything, and magnifying all the elements, to avoid his share of the blame. That's one reason he deserves to be called a whiner.
Another one is that IF -- and that's a big IF -- we are to believe his story exactly as stated, then yes, the supplier screwed up. But anyone with enough sense to come in out of the rain knows that a supplier will screw something up sometime... no one is perfect! Viciously attacking the supplier with the old "never again" thing on at least two fora is not "venting," it's a deliberate attempt to damage the supplier's reputation and cost them future sales from other customers. IMHO, it's one step removed from slander. And that's if we believe his story exactly... but sometimes, just sometimes, this kind of a post is missing some key little details that make the OP look a whole lot worse than the supplier, but were conveniently left out or forgotten.
I can think of three or four other reasons he should be called a whiner and dismissed without much fanfare, but those two ought to be sufficient for any reasonable person with even the lightest dusting of experience in real-world commerce of any kind.
And before you tell me I'm being too harsh on the poor little mama's boy, I will tell you that when you post a thread like this, you are de facto open to the possibility that others will examine your own actions, your motives, and the merits of your accusations. Even the idea that such a conversation should be kept one-sided, and should not examine the faults or merits of the OP himself, is absurd. Yes, I'm being harsh on him (which is not my usual MO), but only because he's bloody well earned it.
saaketham wrote:
He placed the order on Aug 10th. Isn't 10 days reasonable time to expect the prints back
I think you'll find if you visit the thread on POTN where the OP posted the same complaint, that this matter has been investigated and has now been resolved to his complete satisfaction.
Helen Oster wrote:
I think you'll find if you visit the thread on POTN where the OP posted the same complaint, that this matter has been investigated and has now been resolved to his complete satisfaction.
Here is the link to the thread on POTN for anyone who cares to read it. Be advised it is 3 pages long, with many replies having little or no connection to the issue presented by the OP.
Bottom line on the POTN thread is that companies make mistakes, no company is perfect. You can have a failure rate of 1 in one million widgets, but there's a 100% chance the buyer of the defective widget will be vociferous on the web.
Advocates like Helen are invaluable in helping customers solve problems and protecting the company's reputation.
saaketham wrote:
True .. but why's everyone blaming the OP for a mistake made by Adorama?
As I tried to explain, it was a mistake by a single employee - not everyone who works at Adorama, and was not due to a lack of processes and procedures, which staff are expected to follow.
It was one person messing up.
This doesn't excuse what happened, and no matter how close to an event an item is ordered if a company representative says we will deliver, that is what we should be doing.
We make every effort to avoid such uncharacteristic and disappointing experiences, and the member of staff concerned is going to be more closely supervised by the departmental manager to improve the ongoing service provided.
Helen .. I, along with several others really appreciate you and Henry (B&H) for doing what you do to solve customer problems. No doubt you guys are doing a great job. And thank you for that.
I was just wondering why everyone's calling the OP unprofessional when he did place the order, including expedited service 10 days in advance. That's all.
I do understand what you are saying - and I feel that the OP should have been able to depend on us to get his order out on time - or to have provided a good explanation at the time as to why it didn't happen.
saaketham wrote:
Helen .. I, along with several others really appreciate you and Henry (B&H) for doing what you do to solve customer problems. No doubt you guys are doing a great job. And thank you for that.
I was just wondering why everyone's calling the OP unprofessional when he did place the order, including expedited service 10 days in advance. That's all.
The reason people think the OP is mainly at fault for his client not receiving the photo book on time was because he either 1) set unrealistic expectations for his clients, or 2) failed to properly plan for his client, and was blame someone else for his failure.
If you read the POTN thread, he pretty much disappeared from that thread once people figured out he failed to plan properly to ensure his client is taken care of. It is disingenuous to blame the downstream vendor if you didn't plan properly.
It is true that Adorama failed in this case given the minimal margin for error here. I suppose they took care of him to his satisfaction (likely gave him full refund to shut him up.)
