According to the documentation:
“Customers will be required to login before they will be able to view the full details of their order and will be able to delay or reroute the delivery to a new address…”
I get the impression from recent communication with customers trying to do their own re-routes, that they are not getting prompted for that required login when they arrive on their tracking page.
Are they supposed to be presented with a login, or are they just supposed to puzzle that out?
They will be able to view basic tracking info without logging in, but to re-route and view order details they need to login. There should be a login button with the text “Please login to view specific order details”.
Well, that explains it. The button needs to also say “… or to redirect the package.” Can I change this someplace?
Not seeing it in the resource bundle so it doesn’t look like you can, unfortunately 
Man, I wish we could utilize the feature. The problem is that according my understanding, any re-routing fees (which can cost as much, if not more, than the original shipping cost) is billed to us, the shipper…meaning that we can have 50 people request re-routing just because they don’t want to bother to be home, and we’re left to pick up the tab. $$$ up in smoke for no reason other than the fact that they can + don’t want to do whatever they would normally do to be home (or change shipping to their office, etc.). And while it may give rise to the argument that “a happy customer is a customer for longer” or “what’s the long-term cost of losing that customer due to delivery issues?..what if a customer won’t join because they can’t ship to their office and are worried that they won’t be home for deliveries?”, we simply haven’t run into those kinds of issues. Folks either pick up at the winery (90% of our club), send to alternate address, opt for quarterly delivery of bundled shipments, or contact the shipper to make arrangements (such as retrieval from the depot). While I’m guessing we probably fall into the minority of wineries with this much “luck” when it comes to shipping/delivery/customer retention, we’d still LOVE to offer our customers an easier way to manage their delivery preferences…we just don’t want it to default to “winery will pay for any incurred cost”, without the option to have the customer pay (or even know that they’re incurring a cost for that matter). I have plenty of customers that would willingly use the feature and pay for any additional charges…but to my knowledge, such a workflow doesn’t currently exist.
Besides that, we ship FedEx, and I think this only applies to UPS anyhow…so I guess the point is moot to begin with. But for my Christmas wishlist this year, I’d like the feature to be available with FedEx, I’d like the customer to have to accept any delivery upcharges, and I’d like for ElJefe to get everything he wants for christmas too 
How sweet! 
In a way I am happy that my customers can’t figure out how to redirect, because it gives me a chance to negotiate the address for future shipments.
What’s not entirely clear to me is how to find out which of my customers successfully redirected their packages themselves, so that I can go back and negotiate…
If you are a user of ShipCompliant, take a look at their offer. I think it works with both FedX and UPS. It does the things I believe you want to do. We had a 3-way call with SC and Vin65 and SC said they would not open up their API to enable Vin65 to get the statuses on shipping because they want to sell their own service. The problem with this for me is that the customer never sees ShipCompliant and their only point of interaction on their shipments is the Vin65 system which does not have all of the statuses updated. ShipCompliant relies on emailing statuses but we all know that is not a guaranteed way to make contact.
Shipping is expensive and frustrating for us and our customers. The rerouting is especially expensive. We have been holding off charging or passing along the shipping reroute fees but am leaning towards that moving forward. We often like to compare our practices to Amazon, but wine is different because it is perishable and requires a signature. Let’s hope we can find a better way to do this.
Wow. Wasn’t familiar with these new offerings from SC…I’ll look into them. Thanks for the tip!
