i got an order on 22 december which i wasn’t immediately able to fill, but everything had already been ordered and i was expecting it around 15 january, so i wrote to the person, who has an email address at aol dot com, and gave them four options for what i could do.
> 1) send you what we can and wait for the rest
> 2) wait for the rest and send it all when it comes
> 3) refund your order
> 4) other, suggested by you.
i never heard back from them, so i chose option 2, since that’s what i would have wanted myself.
i got email from the same person, only at a different email address than the first one, a couple of days ago, asking where his order was. i responded again, to both addresses, saying that i had responded once already, and giving them the same options as before, only now i said that it would probably be shipping out some time in the coming week.
today i got an email the subject of which was “First Request for Information About Buyer Complaint: Case ID #PP-133-474-425” from paypal. apparently he hasn’t been getting the emails i have sent, and now is threatening my ability to do business because of it. at the same time, his package is sitting here on my desk, all wrapped and ready to ship out tomorrow. instead of sending it normal priority mail, now i have to overnight it to him, and then hope that he has enough knowledge of internet to cancel his complaint with paypal, because the only other option is for me to refund his money, and i’m not particularly inclined to do that when the problem is not mine, and i have lived up to what i said i was going to do.
EDIT: i’m going to do the only thing that makes sense, which is i’m going to overnight the package to him, with a tracking number, and then i’m going to get on paypal and resolve the dispute myself, by saying that i’ve already shipped it with the tracking number as proof…
but it’s still annoying… 8/
if i were sending out a newsletter, i’d adopt a similar attitude about the whole thing, but as i’m sending out stuff that people have paid for already, i can’t afford to be so blasé about it. what annoys me the most about the whole thing (apart from the guy not even waiting the four to six weeks it says on the site before disputing the matter), is that paypal only gives you two options: either give them a tracking number, or refund the customer’s money… there’s no way to enter the circumstances that i was experiencing at all. 8/
AOL is particularly stupid in many ways. I have several people on my email list who’re on AOL and at least twice (maybe more, haven’t checked lately) my e-newsletter has been bounced by AOL with a nice error page to go to. The error page essentially says “the IP address you’re coming from resembles an IP address that’s sent spam at one time or another so fuck you and your mail”.
I worried about it for a while but finally decided (in my usual arrogant fashion) that if someone signs up for my mailing list and is dumb enough to still be using AOL, screw ’em. I have many important worries. :-/
HH
i know, email isn’t reliable… i’ve been working with communications servers for a long time, and i know any number of things that can go wrong anywhere along the line, but 99.98% of the time, it’s good enough for most things. if it were an order of $500, or of diamonds or something like that i would find some way of getting a phone number, or sending a snailmail response, but for orders of less than $20 that work every other time i’ve sent responses, email should be good enough… and the more i experiment with different things (like sending, who is also at AOL, a message and having her respond to it), the more i suspect that, for whatever reason, the problem is on their end and doesn’t actually have anything to do with me. somebody who doesn’t know how it works configured AOL’s spam filter on that computer, or something like that.
and paypal may not be perfect, but for what i am doing, it is a lot less expensive than processing credit card orders myself. i just wish all of my customers were not so impatient… after all, it does say, that orders could take four to six weeks to arrive, and this person didn’t even wait three weeks before disputing the order. 8/
okay…
try sending emails at same time from another system like msn or yahoo to see if they receive them? your ISP email system isn’t infallible, nothing is really.
due to the wait for goods to come back in stock i think i would have sent a detailed letter by snail mail too. although when in your circumstances i tend to leave a note in emails asking the recipient to email me back within 48hrs including the content of your email to make certain communication is clear and not getting lost anywhere along the way.
Paypal is killing a lot of peoples small businesses too in conjunction with certain banks. for example, my bank handles paypal payments correctly, but my ex-wife with the same bank is experiencing bad things happening, with paypal money going out, coming back, then going out again, sometimes even bouncing back and forth a couple of times.
I know people running web hosting companies that lost their businesses because of similar issues.
I trained originally as a systems analyst and know we still need hardcopy of everything today to ensure correct services. maybe you need to bump your service/postage costs out to include snail mail simple letters sent out with every order above a certain amount or maybe just for special circumstances similar to this? (even snail mail can get lost obviously, but it makes good business sense) you just have to look at the money involved and decide whats the best way to keep your business reputation.
If you still have my Email address in your address book, try me.
yeah, but what’s really annoying is that now i’m not certain that anybody’s getting my emails… i’ve got another customer whose order is in similar circumstances, and one of my personal friends, and neither one seems to be getting email from me, and i don’t know whether it’s my system, or whether these are just extrordinarily timed coincidences… 8/
Oh yeah, that’s annoying as hell. I’ve had a few similar incidents when I was selling on eBay.