Appreciate the effort you are putting in. Can’t help but think that Philips the company not Ivo the individual should be doing more.
It is an absolute mess and not one for you to unpick it is for someone senior in Philips to resolve. There are projectors in the UK for sale they should be redirected to customers. Likewise in other countries.
The forwarding company in China should not be used anymore and a competent alternative found.
What due diligence did Philips complete prior to picking the forwarding company. Was it what’s your price? Oh your cheap let’s go.
Anyway it is getting a bit boring the lack of results from Philips. Not having a go at you Ivo. Just fed up with the lack of professionalism from Philips. It is worse than some of the bad one man band indiegogo campaigns.
According to the latest info I have, the forwarder is working on shipments to Macau.
A list of which kind of ID’s do you mean?
I honestly do not know, and no, you did not make a mistake.
What I’m saying is that given the current record of this forwarder, I could not guarantee anything. I’ve seen them ship to the other side of the world within 4 days, and also take months to ship to their own backyard in Asia.
So I still can not guarantee that. If there’s a time window to a shipping address I prefer to not even commit to trying as I can’t guarantee anything in this regard.
And other shipments including “one for the road” are not the hindrance of any already booked shipments like yours, the unit we allocated for your shipment is waiting at the forwarder for a solution to be found.
We are doing as much as we can, all of us. We got extra people in to work on some tasks so that I can focus on the tasks that are difficult to resolve, and to find the actual solutions. We even have senior staff working on these cases, like our CEO Steve (known on the forum as PhilipsSteve) who is actively helping out on a daily basis including the weekends.
The projectors that you may see online at retailers are not ours, they are units bought by these retailers via the same campaign. We told them to hold off sales until we we’re done with the campaign, but we didn’t expect nor plan to still be busy on this campaign to this date. So we can’t very well go and collect the units back from them and tell them to ship these to our backers instead, it just doesn’t work that way.
We have and still are looking into divorcing from this forwarder. This is not easy however, as we not only need them to finish the campaign with the stock they’re still holding on to, but also to finish resolving the issues with shipments already carried out by them, like returned to sender, claims, and still in transit items.
When we were selecting forwarders we looked at more than just price on our side, but also to the added costs for the backers. We had at least 2 other forwarders we tried with before settling on this one. And they have delivered over 14000 units just fine in the end, with about 1500 issues (not yet shipped, still in transit, returned to sender) still to be resolved. And some of these were not even their fault but were due to people moving and the addresses not being changed in time or in the right place, some people refused to pay the import taxes upon arrival to their country, others were not at the address specified due to corona, the packages were sometimes lost, damaged, or stolen before the backer got it, etc.
The biggest problem we have with them is the communication. I sometimes ask them something, and either get no response at all or get a reply that I cannot understand or use at all.
Checkout this exchange I had with them on the subject of shipments returned to the German warehouse.
These shipments would’ve been in the backers’ homes by now if they had done as I asked on the 10th.
It’s the forwarder who’s causing us to look bad unfortunately, and we can’t get rid of them just yet unfortunately. Their faults in these cases caused us such an overload in tickets that we also succumbed to them and are slowly crawling back up from that also. If they had handled the list I sent them for instance, that would’ve been another 54 cases I could’ve solved and closed the tickets of.
@IvoGrijt@Philips_Support_N in case you guys have missed it or just ignoring our posts in “Shipment to Qatar” thread, please provide update as you have promised us for a workable solution 1 MONTH ago, and yet nothing being conveyed to us!
This information is now a month old with no solution for Kuwait shipping despite cargo shipments being open (the whole pandemic period). Seems nobody from Philips care anymore.
Don’t be sorry Ellis, we are sorry you even have to bring these up!
I try to be open and honest with you all, and while some may say “we don’t care about your internal issues, just deliver!”, when you comment on the process and basically indicate wanting to discuss this, I will tell you what I know and what’s going on.
As for Qatar and Kuwait, I unfortunately do not have the solution and therefore an answer to give that would satisfy the backers there. Every single day we talk about this but we do not get further really on this. I don’t know what else to say at this moment, it’s not out of our sights nor are we ignoring you deliberately.
Are you really processing the ticket from Zendesk? There isn’t any reply for nine days. Is there a company’s customer service reply so slow like Philips?
I had nothing to reply, no status update to give, and thousands of ticket to handle.
The latest update from the forwarder is that they will finish arranging the shipment for HK & Taiwan backers today Friday the 21st and provide the tracking numbers to us.
There is no point talking about this every single day from your side in your meetings whatsoever - must be waste of time. If no solution then I would suggest refund to all affected backers. Nothing can happen anyway!
@IvoGrijt what are you talking about? You dont have solution for shipment to Qatar? Captainolives has received his projector in Qatar, that is so called test run.
Now we have proven way to get the projectors into Qatar why dont utilise the same for remaining 7 of us?
I still don’t get it, a list showing you are where? In our sights? On our plate, our to do list? I have plenty of lists, of tickets, shipments still in transit, problem shipments that never even happened, of people still to be fulfilled, you name it, I have it.
Please be a bit more specific what you want to know exactly.
Regarding Qatar & South Africa, the solutions aren’t there yet, not for solving all the shipping issues yet.
Something was forced or an opportunity presented itself, but there isn’t a structural surefire way to get the units to you guys yet. The unit that was sent to @captainolivez for instance happened to be available in the German warehouse, from a shipment that if I’m not mistaken was returned to sender because the shipment was put in the batch to the EU but was addressed to a ROW destination not covered by the shipping booked. So there was a “spare” that they could send out to him. The one that went to South Africa to this day I don’t personally know how that was done or where it came from or what route it took.
All I know at the moment is that we don’t have a surefire way to get projectors into these countries, or enough units to get them in via a certain route.
We keep talking because things could shift daily, and like I’ve said before we are still looking for solutions.
@IvoGrijt your reply is misleading as usual. For few months previously you said your forwarder could not deliver to Qatar due to battery etc. Now “test run” was made and proved shipment to Qatar is possible.
Regardless from where the unit will come, we know it now, it is possible to send unit with battery to Qatar.
Also if there is no surefire solution for Qatar why @Philips_Support_N has started to sent units from Switzerland to Qatar’s backers?
I think what u meant by sure-fire solution is sure-make-profit and cheap shipment solutions of which i believe at this moment Philips should change the priority from trying to cut cost on shipments, rather to ship the unit individually as required to let all backers receive their unit as soon as possible.
