For your own sanity, be careful about using FedEx print services.

I have not posted for a while for a variety of reasons, but I feel compelled to relate my story about ordering FedEx business cards.

On July 25th I ordered business cards via the FedEx print services website. I went through the work of designing the business cards via the site, and looked forward to getting the results in the mail as soon as possible. A week went by, and I expected to get the cards in the mail any day. They never arrived. I decided to look up my order and track it online, and lo and behold, the order was marked as delivered! This was clearly not right -- they never arrived (despite other FedEx packages having arrived in the same time frame). So I called FedEx.

First they told me that it was my fault for not receiving the package. I explained that I never saw a sticker or anything. They suggested that the package was left at my home and stolen, and that this was my fault. I suggested that they have delivered many packages and never left anything before. They told me they would look into it and call me back. A week went by. They never called.

I called again. This time the person I spoke to said that since no sticker was left then the package was never delivered to my address, and was possibly delivered to a different address. They told me they would reach out to the driver and have him call me. He never called.

A few days later I called back again, and they told me that once again this was my fault because "I was the shipper". How does this make sense? Because I paid for the shipping. So in the eyes of the representative that I talked to, I am the shipper of every Amazon.com purchase I make, because I paid for shipping. I hung up and called back and got someone else who said that this was not right at all, and that the local office would need to deal with this, but this was clearly the fault of FedEx and the shipper (who was FedEx print services!), and that they would have the local office call me back. They never did.

A few days later someone else called me and said that he was following up on my first call about a missing package. I told him my story, and he apologized, and said that he would have the local office call me back. They never did.

A few days later I called again and this time the person I spoke to ad FedEx said that this was the shipper's fault, but that since the shipper was FedEx print services I needed to call a different company (evidently FedEx print services is a different company from FedEx). I did that, and the FedEx print services person apologized and told me that they would look into the issue and call me back.

Another few days and no call. I called FedEx print services again and related my whole story. The person I spoke to took pity on me and said that she would have my order re-printed and express delivered to me. It would be there by Friday, August 30th. I thanked her and waited. Friday came and went with no delivery.

I called the following Tuesday (today). The person I spoke to said that FedEx systems had experienced a bug over the past week that prevented all re-orders from being processed. They had fixed the bug, but evidently then proceeded to ignore the re-order requests that had been filed during that time. She said she would submit the re-order again and it would be delivered the following week. I told her that I would be on vacation that week, and asked whether she could hold the order. She said she would try and would get back to me.

10 minutes later she called me back to tell me that because more than 30 days had passed since the order was placed, it was no longer possible for her to submit a re-order request. I had to now get a refund and start over. A refund would have to be approved by senior management and would take from 15 to 30 days.

Who wants to take bets as to whether I ever get a refund? I told her I would call at the 15 day mark to check on things, and she said that if I did they wouldn't actually be able to check on the progress of the refund request anyways, so don't bother. I think I will call on that date anyways, as based on my experience, there is probably only about a 20% chance that her requesting a refund will actually end up being done correctly.

For the record, 80% of the people I have talked to at FedEx have been very friendly and have apologized profusely for the mess-ups.

IT'S ALIVE!

Whoops, forgot to post this weekend. Too busy rockin in the free world.

We went live last Monday! Well, sort of live. I didn't feel that the site was sufficiently tested so I hid the links for new users to sign up, and asked friends to test the site. They provided awesome feedback, both in terms of bugs and in terms of usability. Haven't really made it all the way on the usability stuff, but made big strides this week, to the point where I'm happy to report that we are now L-I-V-E. The training wheels are off. New users can sign up. Booya, as the Buddhists say.

I think the biggest lesson this week is: I really need to write a special technical blog post on Fedex integration. Much of my time this week was spent trying to get Fedex the company and Fedex the technology (mostly the company) to work with me. The folks at Fedex are great, but their processes are pretty typical for a big company, in that they don't quite work for the customer. Presumably those processes serve some other Sisyphean purpose. I felt like Napoleon invading Russia. At first I was all "hey, this isn't so bad", then I thought "ooh, that bit there was pretty hard, but I'm sure things will go well from here on out". Right now it's springtime after the Russian winter, and hopefully that analogy proves malapropos. Man, I am full of the big words today. Didn't get enough sleep last night.

Anyway, big week in other ways as well. Moved into the storage space (in pitch blackness ... power outage ... I can only assume that a murderer was hiding in the room and only didn't chainsaw me to death because I didn't turn on the lights). Bought approximately one carpload of supplies (boxes, bags, tape, bubble wrap, etc) and tools (custom-made stamp, product photography equipment, office furniture, scale, etc). Moved onto the next phase of design work for marketing and site refinement. Did a bunch of market research. Ahhhh! Starting to feel like a real company. It will more so when I get real revenue. ;)

For the checklist crowd, here's what went down:

• drove out to Lombard to pick up many hundreds of dollars worth of packaging materials from Go Packaging. Did so using a rented 16' Budget Rental truck. Great rates for businesses with those guys, if a smidge unreliable.
• Purchased a nice scale, tables, office chair, product photography equipment, stamps, and a sign for the processing location
• Got rejected by Fedex label certification. Worked with about half the web support team to try to fix it. Made little progress, but today things started looking up.
• Implemented better workflow for the sign-up process. That took surprisingly long, but I learned how to do things like this in rails better, and how to use the rails cache better.
• Finally got real insurance offers.
• Did a bunch of market research. Created lots of delicious spreadsheet data, with the help of Dan Kamerling.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs.
• Got a bunch of legal stuff resolved through my lawyer and through lawpivot.com.
• Submitted a post to crowdspring for some ad copy. So far little response. Anyone want to get paid a pile of money to develop an ad campaign for me for the El in Chicago?
• Implemented hoptoad.com for error alerts on the site. They are awesome.
• Now in the process of implementing a new pricing strategy for the site, and of finalizing improved fedex functionality. Next step: more marketing! And value-add functionality of course. :)