A Tale of Two Shippers

I do a lot of internet purchasing(and yes, I do total it up come tax time for good ol' NYS.)  In the last 3 months, I've bought 2 lax shafts, 1 lax head, several lax shorts, football tickets, CityPass tickets, fishing tackle, some stuff from Williams-Sonoma, and the stuff I'm reviewing on-line.  I've had great experiences, not-so-great experiences, and everything in between.  I thought I'd share a couple of recent on-line purchase experiences, both of which are custom printed products.  First the Good.  I recently ordered several photo books from My Publisher.

My Publisher offers a free program download that makes it extremely easy to put together photo books.  They offer several sizes of books in paperback, hardcover, leather covers, etc.  You can caption and arrange your photos yourself, or let the software do it by chronological order.  I chose to make an A to Z minibook(tiny little 2.5"x3.5" books) of my boys. The software is so easy to use with drag and drop functionality.

I ordered 8 of my minibooks on Thursday May 10th.   The minibooks are only $2.99 each, and shipping for all 8 only added $1.69.  That's 8 minibooks + shipping for less than $30.  They e-mailed an order confirmation at 9:07am.  At 2:15pm, they e-mailed that my order had gone into production, and that it could be seen and tracked on-line.  The next day, May 11th, I received an e-mail that my order had shipped at 10:37am.  I received my package the next day, May 12th.  How sweet is the note on the included invoice?  It's cute and makes me smile.

And now the Bad.  My boys play a lot of sports and I've bought an awful lot of spirit wear throughout the years.  $100 warmups for one season of wrestling?  $45 cross country hoodies? Too many lacrosse shorts to count?  Check, check, and check.  This year's spirit wear flyer came home at the start of the season in March.  The on-line storefront was through Graph-Tex and the website stated that orders would be shipped 3 weeks after the storefront's end date.  The Vestal JV/Varsity Boys Lacrosse storefront would stay open til the last week of March.  I placed my order(for a shooting shirt and shorts,) and my credit card was charged on March 21st.  I received an order confirmation e-mail on the 21st at 8:38am.  And then I waited.

And waited, and waited.  3 weeks had come and gone without an e-mail.  I called on Thursday April 27th, and asked about my order.  The gentleman told me that there had been a delay with the shirts, but that they were being printed as we spoke, and that my order would ship on Friday or Monday.  Still no e-mail, but I had spoken with an actual person, and was confident that my order was on it's way.  Thursday May 3rd a package arrived.  Yay!  But it felt a little small.  Urmm...where are my shorts?

1/2 an order, 0 e-mails.  Very good quality, but questionable customer service.

Friday, May 4th, I called and asked about the shorts.  I was told that he would check on the order, and call me right back.  {Insert Final Jeopardy music}  3 hours later, I was told that there had been a delay in receiving the shorts, and that they were expecting them on Wednesday, and would be putting them into production and shipping them out immediately after receiving them.  More waiting.  Still no e-mails.  Thursday, May 17th(today,)  I called at 9:32am and left a voice mail with my order number asking to be called back.  More waiting.  I called again at 1:18pm and asked about my order.  I was told that they had shipped out on Tuesday and that he would e-mail me tracking information.  He even confirmed my e-mail address from the order information.  It's 4pm and there are still no e-mails. 

 I had mentioned in this last phone call that I understand that some businesses charge your card at the time of the order vs when an item ships.  I'm ok with this, as long as I receive e-mails keeping me in the loop, so that I don't feel like someone has absconded with my money.  If my order will be split up and shipped separately, shoot me an e-mail.  I've bought multiple times from Kohl's, Barnes & Noble, Wayfair.com, and the aforementioned Williams-Sonoma when items have shipped separately.  It's not a big deal as long as I'm expecting it.   Incidentally, Graph-Tex is located in Cortland, a 45 minute drive from here.  No package should take more than 2 days to arrive on my door.

So what do you all think?  Is it fair to expect e-mail updates when ordering on-line?  Is 2 months without an e-mail acceptable?  Thanks for popping in and shopping with me.  And check out My Publisher.  These books make great gifts.

*I was not paid or perked in any way for this glowing endorsement of My Publisher.  I'm just really happy with the experience.
*Editorial note* - after going live with this review, I was contacted by a very apologetic Ben Connery at Graph-tex, who refunded my shipping costs, gave me a tracking number, and offered me reasons to believe that this slip up in customer service is not how they like to do business nor is it tolerated.