Once again: The club order went in to WD fulfillment today, and the customer tells me it needs to go to a new address**, and fulfillment is already processing it and I can’t do anything about it, and what I can do I can’t do until Monday night when it leaves WD. In the 21st century this is just impossible to explain to the customer.
I have discussed this at length with @zach - if you agree this matters please do the feature request thing or otherwise let it be known.
** What’s worse is the customer in this instance communicated it to me by updating his contact record online, believing that would work.
Are you transmitting orders via WineDirect API or ShipCompliant?
As you probably know, there are a couple of ways to set up some safety nets. If you use ShipCompliant for order transmission, Club orders need to be manually released to WineDirect. You can also set up Weather Holds for each state in WineDirect as a stop-gate, but you’ll have to manually release them before 1:00 PM each day.
WineDirect’s argument is that they are trying to maximize their capacity and decrease the time between order receipt and shipment as much as possible. They want to have orders on pallets, stuffed in UPS trucks 15 minutes after they receive them. Once that happens, it’s off to the races.
But you make a good point. It would be convenient to have a system that queues redirects so that when the tracking number is active, it simply happens. I’ve seen how WineDirect handles this internally. They use calendar reminders and go back in and update orders as soon as they’re able to be redirected.
I would love that also if we could request redirects while processing. I am always tempted to just put order notes in everything and release them at 12:30 instead, because then I have all morning to make changes.
Yes I am aware of all the safety nets, but WD wants me to have the orders to them 7 days in advance, and authorizing orders more than 7 days in advance is problematic for several reasons - one of which I learned recently and will be the subject of another post - but mostly because of the many customer complaints when I do…
Sure I could run them 14 days in advance, address all the complaints, and there would still be people asking for changes after my deadline.
So, in summary, there is no specific way to redirect packages between authorization and shipping, for me or for the customer. This is a big pain point.
Your point about the authorizing/settling charges prior to shipment is actually a really important one, as it violates the TOS for cards like American Express. Would like to see some improvement there.
I think WD and Vin65 needs a redirect queue. The second those things are active in UPS, the redirect drops in. Subsequently, Vin65 shipment emails would need to pull in the new address.
