Hi Graeme,
Mine also had a duplicate tracking, said delivered in Italy or somewhere till couple of days ago then it all updated from there, just arrived this morning. Hopefully that will be the case for you!
Adam
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Hi @Adam_Reid
Thatâs great news! Seems like the projector was worth the wait from everyoneâs comments, so I hope you find that too. Fingers crossed that itâs a similar situation with DHL.
All the best.
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Call them Graeme, and tell them that others, duplicated or not, have been delivered. If they just scan the label and deliver the package to the address on the label everything will sort itself out. In fact see if you can call your local DHL, or pass by a local DHL service point to discuss in person. Show them both the German site printout as well the UK site, and point out that the item only arrived in the UK on the 24th at 12:58 (or 11:58 UK time)
EDIT: I see you removed your posts, if youâre going to tell me next that you got it, youâd better post a pic as well!
Sorry for all the tags today. Turns out thereâs a happy ending to this story. I called DHL Parcel and eventually got through to an advisor. After some investigation, it turned out that a new consignment number had been assigned today (hence the not being able to track) and it was delivered just as we finished our call. There had been some weird activity with duplicate tracking numbers, but all is solved and Iâm now in possession of the product.
Thank you for the support youâve all provided through this forum. Itâs been a long wait, but one now very much worth it. Apologies again for the numerous tags, but I hoped that someone would be able to help while DHL were being very unhelpful.
Thanks again!
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Now go and name your next-born Ivo!
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Has everyone from Amy batch Europe received the ppm? Still waiting. Latvia
Amy batch, Pakistan. Absolutely nothing. Tracking number was confirmed to be invalid after I pushed to recheck after nearly a month of waiting. It was confirmed no goods were sent out for me. Still waiting for an actual update. I realize shipping is complex and coming from a family of manufacturers that export millions of articles regularly, even during COVID, this whole process just seems inefficient and baffling to me. These are good people but either their forwarders are getting the best of them or it is merely a case of improper expectations management. Modeled after the real world, people should be appointed responsible for different regions so they can take ownership of the different shipments and issues in their region and get things done or there need to be Philips/Screeneo people on the ground at the warehouse location making sure goals are being met and that communication is prompt and transparent. The moment we give people the opportunity to start wondering whatâs going on, where their shipment is or have the need to follow up incessantly, is where one should realize there is something wrong with the process.
That being said, wait patiently my friend. Shouldnât be too long now, letâs hope we all get our devices in good working order after all this wait and that things are smoother for the next time! 
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Some countries are just difficult to ship to during this crisis apparently. Only issue is that the shipping route availability keeps shifting, and our forwarder doesnât seem proactive in letting us know of changes or acting upon favorable changes happening.
If we tell them âship these to Pakistanâ and âship these to Latviaâ and they canât, I would expect them to let us know:
- the tracking numbers of those that shipped
- the reasons for not shipping the rest
- the ET for shipping the rest
- and for them to keep trying to ship them and letting us know the status.
They however donât do the latter 3. We need to keep chasing them, which in my personal experience hasnât always met with great results.
You may say âoh, heâs just using his forwarder as an excuseâ which I partially may be doing indeed. But itâs not with the intent to excuse the total experience you get, but rather to explain what is happening in all transparency.
Whatâs also important to realize: the team at Philips Projection isnât skilled at logistics management at this scale. Philips Projection usually ships to their distributors, perhaps no more than 10, letâs go bigger and say there are 100 worldwide. For this campaign we had to ship to over 14000 addresses, some of which were to exotic or (now) difficult to reach places. Not only did we have to ship, but also handle fulfillment questions and requests for at least one third of the backers. So the team that usually only handles the marketing, some light shipping logistics, product engineering and development, and tech support had to deal with all of these aspects. And while that shift alone was difficult enough, they then were hit the effects of the Corona pandemic, making the whole project become an ordeal instead of a steady campaign.
The whole logistics are that complicated at times that they canât just open a can of people to help with it either, nor would it be financially feasible to do so. The only reasons I could even consider joining the team is because I was already actively following the campaign for months when they asked me to join the team to help them, and am a quick learner.
Of all the 400 tickets Iâve taken and (were) assigned to myself, the distribution is more or less
- 40% âwhere/when is my shipmentâ
- 20% âwhy no reply yet?â or other follow-up / chase mails that get sent as new mails instead of replies to existing tickets
- 10% âmy tracking code doesnât work / invalid / already delivered months ago somewhere elseâ
- 5% other request for information that is available on the forum in the news or FAQs
- 25% real important shipping issues, like lost, stolen, incomplete deliveries, returned 2 sender, address changes, and other delivery exceptions.
But I have to go through them all, determine if theyâre not just chase mails, and answer them all once I find the relative information and status. This is made hard sometimes as sometimes people:
- donât / only mention their name, Indiegogo contribution number, email address. One ticket had nothing more than âwhen will I get my product?â but even the mail address of the sender wasnât in our ordering system.
So I have to search for and gather this information out of multiple sources first before I can even start to answer the mail let alone solve the problem. - send a mail asking if they can change their shipping address, but donât include the address to be changed to. So I have to tell them they can and to please provide the new address.
- send a follow up email to a previous ticket but not by replying, and without including anything more than âso whatâs the status of my request / ticket?â meaning I have to go find possible prior tickets first to see what they mean.
Factor all of these situations in and you soon get a huge backlog and overload. And thatâs only the support desk, I havenât even started on the mentions, replies to posts, new posts, PMâs, assigned threads, internal mails, Facebook messenger requests, mails directly to my personal mail account, etc.
Iâm at the point personally that Iâm almost about to block all PMâs on the forum and requesting only mails to support@screeneo.com so that if God forbid something happens to me at least someone will be able to see and pickup the tasks left behind by me.
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NÄkamnedÄÄŒ vajadzÄtu bĆ«t⊠24.jĆ«nijÄ sĆ«tÄ«jums bija LietuvÄ. PiegÄdÄtÄjs Itella.
Paldies!
How did you find out your tracking number was invalid?
Thank you, Ivo. I get your point but Latvia is not an exotic country as you say⊠and Iâm getting everyday other day DHL shipments. I think we all understood about Screeneo abilities to honor their engagements. No need to emphasize. I will not bother you again. I will just wait
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First of all, youâre not bothering me. My post was to illustrate these points to those who may not have been on the forums (long) enough to have read these kind of statements before. Not to attack nor deflect but to inform and be transparent.
Secondly, my use of the word exotic is to illustrate that for our forwarders, from their location / price point / experience / current cargo crisis, these countries are unreachable by them at the moment. Even the International Space Station is reachable, but not for everyone or everything, so I would also call it exotic.
The fact that other shipments with a different origin / shipping route or company / content / weight still gets delivered to a country, doesnât mean that our big battery containing projectors coming from Hong Kong can make it to these countries via DHL at the price point available. The Russian shipments for instance were undeliverable to private persons via DHL for instance because of the price and weight of the package. But via UPS a route was found that allowed some of these to still be delivered, but at a higher price point. For Brazil and Saudi Arabia we also had to find other forwarders to deal with due to restrictions or issues with those countries.
Again, this is just to enlighten, not to attack or dismiss your statements
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Really i am not sure when we are eligible to submit our query and get the specific answer related to our order.
They r not responding on emails also. We have waited more then 3 quarters and still we have to wait for few more months⊠lets wait no other optionâŠ
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Hi @IvoGrijt
As I have said before, the difficulty seems to be a very poor choice of forwarder. I know @Philips_Support_N previously complained at the high cost of shipping due to Covid. It would seem that in order to reduce costs, Screeneo opted for a cheaper freight forwarder, and this is coming back bite screeneo in the proverbial arse.
The post by @Shahraiz that his tracking number was confirmed invalid is worrying⊠It seems to imply that the forwarder have been falsely creating tracking numbers to make you think that it is has engaged DHL and that things are progressing. The more worrying thing is that this is not the first time that there has been an invalid tracking number issue (e.g. the invalid Kerry Express numbers).
@Shahraiz @Mustafag and I (and presumably thousands of others) are in the same boat⊠We were allegedly on the third list that got tracking numbers on 30 May for ROW shipments. To date we have no idea whether our products are i) still in China, ii) have been forwarded to HK, iii) have been collected by DHL, or iv) have disappeared along the way.
Meanwhile, many others have received their second and even third PPMs.
I really think that the forwarded needs to be taken to task⊠and if they canât perform as promised a new service provider needs to be engaged.
Sorry to vent⊠I know you are doing your best⊠but we are all very frustrated
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The choice of forwarder was made pre-COVID19 pandemic, after two others failed to meet Philips Projectionâs requirements on multiple aspects. Their first shipments happened before the crisis began, and those went largely untarnished and smooth. Then after the crisis theyâve been struggling, and the pressures and issues became apparently too much to deliver the same consistency throughout the campaign and the different regions. So the cost wasnât the only reason for choosing this forwarder in the first place, nor is it cheap. When other options were needed, we have not shied away from making the extra costs involved to still send the products to the âexoticâ locations I mentioned before.
Sharaiz is using the word âinvalidâ, as have you. But that word has many interpretations or causes.
The invalid Kerry Express numbers for instance were invalid for those who got them, but not invalid for who they actually belonged to. Due to a mixup in the file the numbers were read into different Backerkit accounts than they had to go to, with the ones they were actually for potentially also getting someone elseâs tracking or none at all. So the Kerry Express tracking labels you referred to were perfectly valid, but went to the wrong backers.
His tracking labels and many others are âinvalidâ in the sense that theyâre not found on DHLâs systems, because they did not enter the DHL ecosystem physically. The forwarder did book the shipments, generated the labels and stuck them to the boxes, but when they got to the point that they were ready for pickup by DHL (or perhaps were picked up by DHL already even) were told âno service to this are at the momentâ. This meant the shipment of these units never took place, but that doesnât mean the forwarder or Philips Projection is scamming anyone. The only problem here is that of not communicating this back to us properly, and us not having the capacity to track every single tracking label as soon as we receive it for anomalies. They donât either, itâs only when theyâre informed by DHL or us that thereâs a problem do they look into it. They expect, like we do and you do, that shipped means shipped. But when they donât ship, we often donât get to hear that, and even if we do, itâs almost never down to the individual shipment level. Again, in a pre-COVID crisis time these incidents and the reporting thereof mightâve been less present or needed, but in this day and age theyâre more common than any one of the parties involved would like.
We do take the forwarders to task. Sometimes it even comes to virtual, written blows from my part when they just donât come back with solid answers, like when I ask about two specific shipments (specified by internal order number, tracking number, name, and address even) and they say âThe shipment was lost by DHLâ and Iâm like âBut I asked about two cases, which case does this answer refer to, and what happened to the other?â and then get no more updates.
Switching forwarders is not easy either, as we had trouble enough finding one that could, let alone having to transfer all our stock they have to another one, relabeling, etc etc. It would only drag the campaign out longer, without any guarantees. I get updates from many other IndieGoGo campaigns I follow that are also struggling with affordable shipping, some opting to ship by boat to the US for instance to then ship from there.
Note my use of the word affordable, which isnât necessarily equal to cheap. But in order to sell a product at a price youâd want to buy it and the manufacturer also makes the profits he envisions (which is why theyâre in the business of developing and selling goods, to make money), you also have to look at the affordability of the shipping costs involved. We could pay a ticket for someone to pick up three units and fly to Pakistan for instance, and personally deliver them all within 24 hours or less from pickup, but the cost would be more than 3 times the value of a single PPX I believe. So itâs not an affordable way of shipping these even though guaranteed and fast (hopefully).
Lastly, no need to apologize for your âventingâ. If it helps you to get some calmness about this all then by all means. I found it constructive despite being critical, critique can also be positive when brought like you have and is welcomed. We all feel your collective frustrations and our own, as we are frustrated not for one person but for many still waiting after all this time. What we want is to see happy owners of this great product, and we canât wait to see more of those.
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I am picking up the support tickets as well as I can. There are just so many that need attention, some more urgently than others. I have almost 400 tickets assigned to me alone, and thereâs only one other colleague handling the logistical tickets (heâs mostly doing the AfterSales logistics). And thatâs not even all the tickets, Iâve only assigned myself tickets requested / started since the 1st of June, and others that were assigned to me because they got updated recently. Thatâs not including PMâs, mentions, assigned topics, and such here on the forum.
So when are you eligible to submit your query? Any time. We just havenât been able to get around to them all. I spent a few nights just triaging the first 200 or so I had, to determine what the question was about and to categorize them accordingly. Your specific question pertains to a batch that we had until now considered to be shipping already from HK as it belonged to the ROW shipments in the Jordan batch. Now that so much more time than expected has passed, its definitively justified to request an update.
What helps us is if, when you have an issue, provide us with as much information as you have. Yes we can look it all up, but that takes extra time, when you probably have the information, your information, already at hand. So if you have an issue with your shipment or tracking code, it helps me if you provide me with:
- your name or email you backed with if different from the one youâre mailing the support desk with
- your address postcode at least, the full address if you donât mind
- the actual tracking code
- your IndieGoGo contribution ID
- your Backerkit ID
- if itâs a follow up request, the number of the previous ticket if know, or just replying to the last email received in the previous ticket submitted
- the steps youâve already done to solve this issue youâre facing
- as detailed a description of your issue or request as possible
This saves me from having to look up info in all sorts of systems before I can start to find a solution.
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How did you get through to an advisor? Iâm just being sent round in circles asking me for the shipment number then asking me to confirm the postcode which is incorrect but I have found no way so far to get a human