One of our vendors left us high and dry for 3 weeks in December. On December 4th they told us they would no longer be able to guarantee Christmas delivery on new orders. While that sucks we can deal with that. We made sure our site made it clear that any items from this supplier were likely not going to arrive before Christmas.
But our vendor didn’t tell us that they didn’t plan to ship any of the orders we had already sent them at any point in the near future. So we had customers from November 25th that weren’t getting their orders shipped. And our vendor’s biggest sin was that they wouldn’t give us any indication when the orders were shipped. As emails from panicked customers came in we didn’t know what to tell people. It was very stressful.
Eventually the vendor promised us that the orders would ship before Christmas and they would upgrade the shipping at their expense to make sure they arrived by December 24th. While this was still a fiasco because forcing anyone to wait a month is ridiculous and people leave for the holidays before Christmas Eve and some people do gift exchanges well before Christmas at least we had some information to share.
At that point we told our customers what was up, and we explained why. The reason was that the vendor was overwhelmed with orders from the Baby Yoda phenomenon in addition to the already crazy Christmas rush that direct to garment t-shirt printers face.
Most customers responded very positively to this email. Many knew about “Baby Yoda” and were aware that Disney kept the character a secret from their licensing partners so as not to let spoilers out.
Had we sent an email saying that our printers were busy I believe they would have been less understanding, because of course they were busy. But it made sense that this particular case would have been something that couldn’t have been planned for.
So the lesson I’m taking is it is better to give the customers the details when you have to deliver less than ideal news.