The shipping process can be a challenging one for small business owners. Our shipping department is staffed with two people; my husband and a part time employee. My husband is also in charge of printing invoices, e-mailing individuals about their orders, responding to questions, updating the shopping cart, ordering inventory, dealing with returns and exchanges, and managing finances and all of the piles of paperwork that go with it. So it isn’t like he’s full time shipping orders either, there’s a lot to balance out in the shop.

It could be argued that we could use some more employees, and we’re the first to admit that is absolutely the case. But when you’re growing a small business piece by piece, it can take some time to get to the point where that is a feasible option. For now, we just have to do the best we can.

I have made every effort I can to ensure customers know just how long an order may take to ship prior to ordering. From our shipping policies page on our website it reads:

Order Processing

We process orders in the order they are received. This means we might be cutting fabric for other orders that came in before yours before we are able to get to your order.

While we ship packages daily Monday through Friday, processing an order
can take anywhere from 1 - 5 business days. Please take into consideration the processing time period when placing an order. If you are in a big hurry, you can e-mail us for Expedited shipping rates.

Delivery Times

Once your order is processed and enters the mail system, these are the approximate delivery times:

U.S. Orders

USPS First Class and Priority Mail 2 - 3 days
USPS Parcel Post 5 - 12 days
Fed Ex Home Delivery 3-6 days

International Orders
Global Express Mail 5 days
Airmail Letter or Parcel Post 7 - 10 days
Economy Surface Letter or Parcel Post - 2 months

So just because First Class and Priority Mail can arrive in 2 - 3 days, the amount of time it takes to process your order which is often residing in a pile of other orders, can add 1 - 5 business days on top of that.

Still, if there is one thing we’ve learned by running a small business - nobody reads the policy pages before ordering. Nor do they read the homepage before ordering!

Another challenge when it comes to processing and shipping orders are store closings. We take a couple of planned family vacations each year, but we also sometimes have to close the shop for shopping cart upgrades and inventory maintenance, and just plain old server issues. Each time we need to close either the shipping department or the whole store itself, I try to forewarn customers in three ways:

1. I post a notice to the homepage of the shop.
2. I send out a newsletter
3. I post to this blog

But each time, when we return from our vacation we seem to have to deal with a handful of customers who are upset over the delay in shipping. Customers who didn’t read the notice on the homepage, customers who didn’t receive the newsletter due to spam blockers, or who aren’t subscribed in the first place, and customers who don’t subscribe or check in on this blog.

While I understand the frustration of not receiving a package when you hoped it would arrive, it would be nice if customers could read the published notices. I recently asked one such disappointed customer how else we could have communicated that our shipping department would be closed for a period. She was quite frustrated and responded that she didn’t know, suggesting maybe we could make the text big and bold and red or something.

I have tried that before with little success, though perhaps I need to try that method again. I’ve also contemplated pop up windows notifying you of important messages, but many of you have pop up windows blocked on your computers.

If you’re a small business owner, how do you handle scheduled (and unscheduled) store closings? Do you shut down your entire store, disallowing all orders? Or do you try to leave the store open, simply notifying your customers that orders they place will take longer to process? It seems either way, we end up with a few customers who are unhappy, and while it’s only a few - we do care about each and every one of our customers and are always striving to serve them better.

Sometimes we make mistakes too. It’s not always the customer’s fault! Really, we’re just having fun here, sharing some of our wilder customer service stories, for the most part our loyal customers are fantastic! Today’s story is one that practically gave me a stomach ulcer at the time, because it was all our fault baby!

During our first year of business, I was pregnant with my second child. I suffer from Hyperemesis during my pregnancies. This means, for me, I throw up anywhere from 5 - 20 times per day. For some, the disease is life threatening. Women get very dehydrated and have to get IVs. My babies always did very well, my body shifts gears when I’m pregnant. It doesn’t care much about me, but allocates all of my resources to the baby. Which is good, I’m thankful my babies never suffered. I was a mess, however.

I was very ill, I’d been in for an IV treatment and told to stay in bed. That was fine by me, if I held very still with my eyes shut, I could often keep the vomiting at bay. Crippling depression accompanies Hyperemsis for me, and it’s really a very dreadful, dark time.

During this period, my poor husband was trying to run the business without me. He does a pretty fine job on his own now, but then, when everything was new and he didn’t have any help, it was really stressful for him. Eric was also trying to keep an eye on our toddler so he didn’t disturb me, and ladies, he’s a terrible multi-tasker.

Eric accidentally shipped some metal snap dies to a customer First Class, when they had specifically selected Priority Mail in order for it to get there before Mother’s Day. The package arrived after Mother’s Day, and the customer was upset to find they’d paid more for shipping than we’d paid to send it.

The customer writes, and my husband writes back. They go back and forth. My husband said something about how if packages are under 13 ounces, he always ships it First Class because the Post Office has told him it will arrive in the same amount of time. Well, regardless of whether or not that is true, if a customer has paid for Priority shipping, it should ship Priority. And if it didn’t, the customer should be refunded the shipping overage, right? Eric made some more mistakes talking about Paypal fees, and was just plain ornery.

Well, Eric must have been going out of his mind or something, because he argues with the customer for a while until his wife, the one he had purchased the die set for, emails him and says that she’ll leave negative feedback. At this point, even though he’s been specifically ordered by my midwife not to disturb me or stress me out in anyway, he climbs the stairs to tell me what’s going on.

I e-mailed the woman back, apologizing for my husband and refunding the shipping overage. I made a newbie business owner mistake by going into too much detail, rather than just solving the problem and getting it over with, I told her about our shopping cart issues, and my pregnancy sickness. She responded amicably and I felt relieved that I’d solved the situation.

Except, she still went on to post negative feedback for us, complete with an animated “sad story” smiley face playing me a violin for my “morning sickness”. The review was so upsetting at the time, especially since I had apologized and rectified the situation, but I suppose it was justified seeing how horribly my husband had handled the situation. Still, it rankled with me for an entire year after the fact! If that customer is still around today, perhaps she’ll take some satisfaction in knowing that. ;)

Ah well, you make mistakes when you’re in business, especially when you’re first starting out. It used to really make my stomach do acrobatics, but I’m less emotional about it now. We do our best, and sometimes we fail.

What should have occurred in this situation, was my husband should have immediately refunded their entire shipping amount and issued a coupon code for their trouble, apologizing for missing the Mother’s Day date they were trying to make. First rule of customer service: Don’t go into a bunch of unnecessary detail. Your customer does not need to know all about your shopping cart issues, Paypal fee gripes, or even your death bed illness. Okay, so I wasn’t on my death bed, but even with how sick I was, I shouldn’t have expected anyone else to care. Especially not after my husband had handled the situation so badly.

Want to see our terrible review? Here it is! Click to embiggen.

Good thing he didn’t “send our business into the toilet” like she predicted, but we have learned a thing or two about customer service since then!