fluffy,
my order# is 952. ordered on Dec 9th, 2013 , "shipped/bag out" on Jan 9th, 2014
Question for you: Where the fuck are my frames?
Thanks
The shipping method you chose during checkout was Surface Mail. Delivery and returns policy with timelines for the different shipping methods is here. We're still within the expected transit time period for the shipping method you chose, but I will add it to the list to query later this week:) |
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Fluffy, when are you expecting feedback for an expected delivery?
On your parcel in particular (different transit dates, so slightly different routes) I am expecting feedback on Wednesday morning, so I will be in a better position to know how to proceed with resolving yours then:) |
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Fluff,
Thanks for responding.
In response to this -
- We are not a going concern, we are a bootstrapped startup. That means we have no overdraft facility (the bank won't even consider it without 6+ months of cash-flow). We have extremely thin margins, and every cent of profit goes towards improving our fabrication systems, reducing our JIT fabrication tail, and on new product development. We simply would not have - and do not have - the cash necessary to re-fabricate and re-send parcels.
Might I ask you why it is that I care how thin your profit margins are? When I'm sitting in the business I run and a customer brings a complaint to me about a certain product, I don't sit there and explain to the customer how I make such a crappy profit margin on that item. I fix the situation and don't give excuses. The customer doesn't care about all of the excuses you can come up with. The customer wants ANSWERS not excuses and that is the biggest thing I think you will learn from this experience. Don't tell me why it happened tell me how your going to fix my problem.
I completely understand that money is strapped tight but unfortunately fluffy if you can't financially back your products when issues like these happen than you shouldn't be in business. What if a customer for instance tried claiming that because the shipping presented to us showed as being 4-6 weeks on the website, and that we had assumed we would have those racks by that time they haven't been able to set up their mining rigs. In theory if someone really wanted to get creative they could try and make a claim against your company for hampering their ability to make money. I know this is far stretched but my point is that you clearly have very little additional funds to run your company. If a customer decided to be an ass and pull a stunt like this would it not basically bankrupt you in legal fees? Even if the claim is frivolous you would have to argue those claims and it would cost you thousands in attorney fees which you clearly don't have. Why you would honestly admit that you have very little money in a open forum is beyond me because all that tells me is that if I EVER have a problem with your company on a future order I honestly have a VERY VERY slim chance of ever having it resolved. I never make my customers wait for me to receive the insurance claim on their parcels if they go missing. We all know that insurance claims sometimes take months, and this is completely unfair and unethical to ask a customer to wait that long. If you decided to reship the parcel and then the first one arrives and it isn't returned to your company, that is what I call the cost of doing business. I have shipped hundred dollar items before and then the package appears to go missing. I then receive a denied insurance request because somehow the item arrived still. I will email that customer ONCE asking them kindly with a prepaid shipping label to please return it. If the customer doesn't return the item I don't harass them I simply chalk that up to being part of doing business. You should of assumed that you would have small issues like this when shipping international and you should have allotted funds in case of a mistake like this.
I most definitely do appreciate you refunding my shipping costs. What I did explain to you privately was that I would actually prefer to receive my item over receiving a refund period. It isn't about how much I paid for shipping costs. It is about the fact that you falsely represented a delivery time frame to your customer who was expecting to have received their item by that time. In all honesty by the time this parcel gets here freaking AMD will probably have a new graphic card generation lol. I know its not your fault once the parcel is out of your hands but to blame not knowing who was affected as a reason for not fixing the situation is just pure ignorance. It's not mine or Wobbzzz fault that you don't have the funds to replace our orders at your own expense. I feel bad for you but from a business standpoint I really don't care how you fix it or what you do. All I care about is the fact that the items I have ordered will be on my door step by the end of March.
I would just like to end this by once again thanking you fluffy for your dedication and help in the matter. I think where you are wrong is by shifting the blame off of your company and yourself and onto any other excuse you can find. Please take responsibility for the mistake even if it wasn't your own. I really do thank you for the quick responses but someone must hold you accountable and unfortunately it seems that I have to be the one.
Josh, I find your reply confusing. I have been as transparent as possible because the minute anyone running a Bitcoin-related business is cagey, everyone screams "mtgox!" and "bitcoinica!" and "scam!" So many customers just long for honesty and transparency - even if that means admitting that things are not 100% at the moment. Yet my transparency is met with replies such as yours which effectively encourages a lack of transparency? I must admit, that sort of attitude doesn't bode well for you given you that you have positioned yourself in direct competition to us. Whilst I appreciate you telling me how to run my business, you are an external third-party, a direct competitor no less, unfamiliar with the dynamics of the company, of the group, or even of my personal ethics. You have never been in my situation, it is a logical impossibility, so you cannot tell me how you would react or how you would have dealt with matters. You can only speak hypothetically based on an external view and filled with competitor-bias. I'd like to point out - again - that your situation was brought to my attention recently, a few weeks ago. I could not react in an unmeasured way and have some sort of knee-jerk reaction, as I needed to first establish 1) did this occur or is someone just trying to game the system or troll us (given that it was so very pubic and not handled privately), 2) assuming there was an error on our side, how many were affected by it, 3) of those affected, how many had already received their parcel or were close to receiving their parcel, 4) given all of this, for those that are affected and are seriously outside of the expected bounds, what restitution could be made? You misunderstand my statement that we could not afford to blanket re-fabricate and re-ship 500 orders with some sort of admission of being cash strapped and unable to solve your person problem - that is absolutely not the case. It should be clear from my statements that I was referencing the entirety of the problem and not two orders specifically, I apologise if that was somehow unclear. Is this extremely measured approach the way we deal with every issue? No - on a case by case basis we try to please customers as best we can, including: re-sending a parcel where a person paid for an upgrade to faster shipping and it was not updated on our backend the day after the error was pointed out or helping a customer realise that he had ordered parts of the Arianna grid without a sidepiece and immediately - at our expense - shipping the extra pieces to him so that they arrive before he receives the rest of his order. We acknowledge where we have screwed up or even where we can foresee a customer is going to receive something unworkable, and we try to make it right, but it has to be within the bounds of what can reasonably be expected especially where the extent of a mistake is unknowable. As Zoella has noted, this situation has gotten quite complicated as any of your responses are unavoidably laced with bias as a direct competitor. Rather than a continuous back-and-forth, maybe we should put this very public debate aside. I will be in a position to resolve your delivery once I have received the feedback I am expecting, and then this matter can be closed. If you have any further comments, questions, or thoughts, please feel free to address them in private with me, as that is more appropriate given the nature of the situation. |
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You know, I almost feel bad for you sometimes, Fluffaroo, but then you say things like this.... [bold for emphasis] - A small number of clients, including yourself and wobbzz, were affected by a bug that presented air mail (at surface mail pricing) and EMS as the two shipping options. You chose the cheaper and slower of the two, perhaps under the impression that delivery would be air mail timelines (around 4 weeks to the US). This was not discovered at shipping time, as shipping data is uncached and 3NF, and showed up on the backend as surface mail. There was no way we could have known till it was brought to our attention.
You already acknowledged that the error was on YOUR END, so why would you act as if the customer made a mistake in the shipping option? If only a "small number of clients" were affected with the error on your end then why not just bite the bullet? I may have given the wrong impression - the customer didn't make a mistake, I'm just providing background as to why we couldn't process it at shipping time as air mail. The guys that do the waybills don't care how much a customer paid - they care about what it says on our backend systems, so if it had said airmail on the backend they would have been agnostic to any cost implication and just processed it as such. I think I've answered the second question at length in my previous post - let me know if I haven't and I'll try again:) |
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In all honesty no disrespect fluffy but we all shouldn't have to fucking do this.
We are the customer and we are basically being forced to search high and low to find our own parcels.
I'm sorry I know you have made efforts and a good will gesture towards me but seriously come on. If your package goes missing by for instance amazon what do they do? They ship out a new one immediately and take care of their customer. I know you aren't amazon and you most definitely don't have the money to be amazon but that is the way you take care of your customers. Not force them to try and do research themselves. I had no idea my package would be shipped Surface mail or else I would of never ordered it.
An example of how I handle customer service with my company which is completely unrelated to bitcoin at all. One time my assistant/employee accidentally changed something in the backend on our shipping and it had caused the shipping to end up showing up as basically 1-2 dollars for every item no matter what service they chose for shipping and how many items or how heavy those items were. What I ended up with was about 150 orders that had picked Express overnight shipping. I received about 3 dollars per order for shipping on items that cost me around 95 dollars to ship them. Keep in mind I was making about 30 dollars in profit per item.
So we are looking at a total of about 14,000 in shipping charges of which I received about 450 for. I didn't decide to cancel all of the orders based off a mistake. I also didn't ship all of those orders using a cheaper method. I ate a $9,000 loss out of my own pocket because a mistake was made by my company. Just saying that I expected a bit more out of a company trying to be such a big dog.
I most definitely do appreciate all of your help finding our packages, and also the good will gestures you have made. Don't take my posts as being unappreciative of your help as that isn't my intention. My intention is to show you that no matter what you should stand by your customer and do the right thing, not put them through hell.
Josh
Hi Josh, I think I need to separate things out here, as there are several points that are rolling together that I want to address separately: - I'd like to make it clear that when someone CHOOSES surface mail, there is nothing we can do. We may have been optimistic with our surface mail timelines initially, but we kept them very open-ended precisely because of the length of time it takes. Whilst I sympathise with those clients that don't read the delivery and returns policy or gloss over the timelines, there is literally nothing I can do to speed the process up for them. There are a LOT of people complaining when they chose a shipping method that is extremely slow, and there has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere, else everyone will be able to claim ignorance of the shipping timelines and bully their way to a refund. - A small number of clients, including yourself and wobbzz, were affected by a bug that presented air mail (at surface mail pricing) and EMS as the two shipping options. You chose the cheaper and slower of the two, perhaps under the impression that delivery would be air mail timelines (around 4 weeks to the US). This was not discovered at shipping time, as shipping data is uncached and 3NF, and showed up on the backend as surface mail. There was no way we could have known till it was brought to our attention. - As I've already mentioned, we have no idea how many customers are affected (restoring the cached pages have been of limited help in determining this, and at a guess it seems it only affected those that used the shipping estimator based on conversations I've had with those that ordered around the same time as you). We cannot blanket-reship parcels if we don't even know who is affected. - We are not a going concern, we are a bootstrapped startup. That means we have no overdraft facility (the bank won't even consider it without 6+ months of cash-flow). We have extremely thin margins, and every cent of profit goes towards improving our fabrication systems, reducing our JIT fabrication tail, and on new product development. We simply would not have - and do not have - the cash necessary to re-fabricate and re-send parcels. - Even if we did have the cash on hand, it would not be a matter of pocketing a shipping difference. As we only discovered the problem after the affected parcels had shipped, we would have to write off the full cost of the shipped parcels, and then have COH to re-fabricate and re-ship affected parcels. We'd then need to trust that customers won't just keep the parcel and will send it back to us, which is an unlikely hope at best. - In line with all of the above I refunded both your and wobbzz shipping fee, given that you were affected by the mishap. As mentioned in private to both of you, I was and am waiting on feedback that will help me determine how long before your respective parcels arrive. Once I have more information, I will be in a better position to determine what to do to resolve it for the two of you. In other words: if your parcel is going to arrive in the next few days, then it is my hope that the refunded shipping has been adequate recompense. On the other hand, if it is still going to take another 4 weeks, I will make a plan to get a second delivery to you sooner, and arrange to get the other parcel collected when it arrives. You absolutely do NOT have to call the post office and end up with the same run-around that I'm in, but if that is what it takes to demonstrate that I am doing everything possible to resolve two isolated situations (yours and wobbzz) then I truly invite you to do so. |
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Fluffy I'm not quite sure I understand this insurance thing. I'm a businessman myself and deal with insurance coverage on a daily basis. Here in the usa you could in theory purchase a blanket coverage that would cover lost or damaged shipping. The thing is though is that any insurance company here that isn't collecting a per package fee and is just offering z blanket coverage would then have a deductible that would come out of your pocket before they even begin paying. For instance I have a very similar policy and my deductible is 250 per claim unless I pay them an insursance fee per item that I ship. Is insurance really that much different?
Also I spoke with an agent at the post office there and he gave me contact information for someone at cape town port that he said would be able to tell me what vessel my package went on. I plan on calling them tomorrow because it really does seem we are getting the run around. I apologize for thinking so negatively but would you not do the ssme ?
Yes, but we'd be screwed on blanket cover due to the volatility of the business - that would only make sense much later on when we have several years of measurable sales under our belt and know what to expect on a month-to-month basis. So we pay per-shipment - we send a weekly dispatch and costing report and get billed based on that over and above our monthly premium. As I mentioned, though, what we pay them under their marine (cargo) insurance policy is cheaper per-shipment than the post office, as well as providing the other advantages highlighted. You are absolutely welcome to wade through the blackhole that is the post office. In fact, I can give you the details for Capemail right now - you can phone any one of the following 5 numbers - +27 21 590 5712/3/5/6/7 and ask for the International Parcels department. Those are the people that dispatched the parcel and have the most direct access to backend systems. I have gone down that road a bunch of times with no success, which is why I'm trying to escalate things from a hub level, hoping that they will know the right people to talk to. Hopefully you'll have more luck than I did:) |
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You really shouldn't even offer surface mail as an option.
I'm removing it next week as soon as we get updated EMS rates - some countries will be much cheaper than they are now:) |
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It may be USPS Priority International (mine was as well), but as far as USPS is concerned, they have not received the package yet. You can't claim against USPS until it makes land and passes through customs.
(At least that's what I was told a few months back by my local office when asking.)
Yours was EMS, though - surface mail would be processes as "First Class Mail International" by USPS (I think). Surface mail shows up as priority mail international. Ah I didn't realise that - that's good, it means it'll be processed faster in-country than First Class International:) |
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It may be USPS Priority International (mine was as well), but as far as USPS is concerned, they have not received the package yet. You can't claim against USPS until it makes land and passes through customs.
(At least that's what I was told a few months back by my local office when asking.)
Yours was EMS, though - surface mail would be processes as "First Class Mail International" by USPS (I think). |
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Yep. I'm trying not to implode about this situation. Fluffy, Who do you submit insurance claims to? Can you direct us to documentation regarding their policy please? From a U.S. perspective, the package is tracking as "USPS Priority Mail International". Per the USPS Priority mail international FAQ, an insurance claim can be filed "no sooner than" 7 days. This means one could be filed right now. I understand what you've been told regarding boat shipping and what you've told us. However, if we can take advantage of this process through USPS, it does not logically make sense to wait. https://www.usps.com/ship/file-international-claims.htm#If your claim is filed through SAPO, then I'm a little concerned by their claim policy. http://www.postoffice.co.za/Insuranceact.pdfIt states "The insured must lodge a claim within 45 days after dispatching the insured letter/parcel." Edit: I understand you have been in discussion with SAPO, but has a formal claim been submitted? Additionally, what boat was our shipment placed on? This question should be resolved by now. We have more than doubled the original 21 day transit time originally quoted for intercontinental vessel transport. Neither, for three reasons: 1. Cover from the postal service is very limited, often not covering missing parts or damage, and only whole loss 2. They are expensive - at their rates it would be cheaper for us to self-insure, because practically speaking there is such a small number of international shipments that truly go missing 3. We have had issues with customs where we declare "No Commercial Value" but we insure it for several hundred Dollars...customs doesn't understand the disconnect. The customer even tried to explain that if you send a family heirloom to a family member you would insure it, but it wouldn't have a commercial value, and the US customs guy was just like "errrrr". So our insurance company that does all of our normal insurance as well as our business continuity insurance is just covering it under an adjusted marine insurance policy, which is cheaper than the post office's. There aren't any lower or upper bounds on claims in terms of time, per se, but obviously they won't even consider a surface mail claim if it's within the post office's published timelines. At the very least they would discuss it with the post office who would kick back the 3 month timeline, and they wouldn't budge until then. I have requested routing info several times from the post office to no avail. The closest I got was estimated routing info for a delivery to Fremont, CA, 94538. Basically, excluding customs processing on either side: there are weekly sailings to Newark, so the parcel may hang around for a week; then to Newark is approximately 25 days; then it sits in Newark for up to a month waiting for the monthly vessel to San Francisco, then it takes approximately 14 days from Newark to San Francisco. Customs is pre-cleared here, but let's add another 2 days on the receiving end for customs and another, say, 3 days for final delivery to Fremont? That means best case scenario assuming no waiting at any port is 6.5 weeks. Worst case scenario with full waiting times at both ports is 11.6 weeks. This is obviously not necessarily your route, but who knows - maybe all surface mail parcels are routed through San Francisco? Seems kinda redundant since Newark is in the US already, but clearly postal routing defies all normal logic. |
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Because it's physically not possible for us to recall surface mail parcels once they've left the country.
Hmm. It is possible in other countries. even Russia. We have asked the post office before - they said that once it has left the country, any return to sender action will cost at least what was paid to send it. If the destination country is a place like the US that stopped their economy service to cut costs, then the return would be by air, which is even more costly. In a situation where we have processed an order against our published timelines, we can only pursue something like that as a zero-sum exercise, which means the cost of the shipping and the return shipping would come out of the refund. |
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I must agree the ground shipping is extraordinarily slow.
If the max shipping time allowed for it is 3 months, I think the shipping option should have a big fat warning in red letters, that
the option may take up to 3 months to deliver after production. I would've certainly gone with EMS if I knew the shipping
time difference was more than 2 weeks...
Definitely - what we've done since is have EMS as our recommended shipping method (in big, bold letters) and put the shipping time frames on the shipping method selection box during checkout, so it's easier to see. We're also trying to get better rates to certain regions so that we can drop surface mail as a shipping option altogether. |
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Why you could not make a shipping reverse?
Because it's physically not possible for us to recall surface mail parcels once they've left the country. sure let me know time-frames for fabrication/shipping-delivery at the time I submitted order.
Our timelines haven't changed, the only thing we've done is added a flowchart for people that don't like to read, and we've adjusted the surface mail transit time because of recommendations made in the previous thread (which is neither here nor there, as even the previous timeline indicated that it could take longer than indicated for surface mail parcels). You can see our timelines on our delivery and returns policy here: https://openrigs.com/information/information&information_id=6Here's a breakdown of your order and our expected timelines (for the shipping method you selected during checkout)| Order Status | Date | Actual Timeline | Published Timeline | Optimistic Timeline | Pessimistic Timeline | | The order status update | Date the status changed | Number of business days that passed for this status | What we publish as the expected typical timeline | The best we've recorded for this status | The worst we've recorded for this status | | Payment received | 2013/11/29 | 0 business day | "the next business day" | 0 business days | 3 business days (during the holiday period) | | Processing and pre-fabrication | 2013/11/29 | 4 business days | "a few business days" | 1 business day | 5 business days (during the holiday period) | | Fabrication | 2013/12/05 | 8 business days | "typically around 8 business days" | 4 business days | 15 business days (during the holiday period) | | Handed to customs for pre-clearance | 2013/12/19 | 9 business days | "a number of business days" | 2 business days | 23 business days (backlog from illegal strike action) | | Shipped to customer | 2014/01/06 | 7.7 weeks currently, undelivered | "6-10+ weeks" | 5 weeks (EU), 7 weeks (US) | 3 months (per the post office FAQ), after which we can successfully claim it as a lost parcel from insurance |
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Fluffy I have not heard back from you in four days privately after my last pm expressing my gratitude for what byou did but still looking for information your suppose to be getting on what ship the package is on. We are going on 39+ days since bag out 42 days would be 6 weeks. I understand your busy but I expect timely responses And updates.
Order 722 good old black friday .
Thank you
Absolutely - you and wobbzz are in the same boat, and I'm waiting on additional feedback (ETAs specifically). Once I've received that I'll be in a better position to suggest some resolution, so I will definitely keep you guys in the loop at things progress on this side:) |
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hmm. why not just reverse it? I was not talking about insurance claim...
Heya - because it has shipped to you using the shipping method you selected and well within our stated timelines. The only time we can refund you is if that parcel goes missing, otherwise it doesn't make sense to dish out refunds when you're going to receive the order you received within the time period you agreed to during checkout? Hope that makes sense:) Here's what you ordered:  And here's your order history:  If it will help I can break down those timelines against the timelines you agreed to during checkout to confirm that we were within our published timelines on your order? |
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Any update Fluffy?
Yes - they've promised me it'll be tracking by CoB Friday:) It's tracking now, thanks! It's a February miracle...the post office actually delivered on their promise! |
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these guys are the real deal. Ordered 5 of their rigs for my garage got it about 11 days after i paid. Im waiting for mid march to cashout with coinbase my bitcoin miners then going to buy more cards and their rigs.
Keep it up openrigs.
Thanks for the positive feedback - that is exceptionally fast for us (if I'm being honest;) you must've chosen EMS or Aramex to get it that quickly:) Our average lead time is often a little longer than that, but we are working to improve it, and it's always good to hear that it is getting better as time goes on. |
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I find it incredibly amusing that almost all the people bitching about "ERMERGERD WHERES MER PACKAGE REFUND REFUND REFUND REFUND REFUND" do not indicate they used the shipping option that was reasonably fast (EMS or similar) and likely are using surface shipping. That's what you get with surface shipping. Deal with it.
Fluffy, keep up the good business.
Thanks:) We don't have any EMS or Aramex parcels that have gone missing or been undelivered, as yet, by far the biggest issue is the length of time surface mail is taking. |
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Hi. Can you reverse package and refund me? I don`t need it anymore. all reasonable time has passed. You can PM me your order number and I can file a claim with our insurance, but if you chose surface mail they may insist on waiting until the 3 month maximum transit period has elapsed. |
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Fluffy,
What is currently being done for customers who ordered on Black Friday and have not received their orders?
We are now at -13 weeks for ordering and -7 weeks for shipping (counting a 10Jan shipment date).
Last I spoke with you was the 24th...
Thanks.
Basically what we've discussed with our insurance is that where a shipment can be determined as missing we will replace it from stock in the US (which should happen in the next month or thereabouts) so as not to keep the person waiting - the trick will be to get that "missing" parcel determination. I opened a few claims for early orders that are undelivered (including yours), so now we wait for feedback from them. |
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