Hi All,

What a frustrating day.

A customer came on to us a week or so ago wanting some satin black plastic cards with two ink colours quantity of 200. We prepared a couple of emails proof for him with slight variations at his request and he approved the email proof and confirmed he wanted to order 200 cards. We processed his payment and order and started the first steps in the manufacturing process e.g. ordered the printing plates.

The day after the order has been placed the customer emailed to say he wants to increase the order to 500 cards, well we were literally about to print his order (we order the printing plates on a next day delivery service) so this was going to cause problems as we could not hold up production whilst waiting for him to confirm the quantity increase/price increase. We emailed back the cost to increase and said we needed to know in the next hour, we heard nothing so phoned on both landline and mobile numbers but there was no answer.

Eventually the customer phoned us back to say he wanted to go ahead but unfortunately the first ink on his job had been printed and second ink was set up and to set up the machine again for the first print would disrupt the production process.

Unfortunately the customer could not see the problem at all and still wanted to upgrade the quantity, I kept saying that it was not possible but he got very cross with me and say he would not order any more cards from us.

I do feel sorry for the customer but if he had ordered 500 in the first place there would be no problem or if he had got back to us in the time period we asked him to it would have been ok.

I think he was so cross as the price difference between 200 cards and 500 cards is not a lot different however we do make our pricing very clear, it is even included on the actual email proofs and he had of mentioned earlier about the increase it would have been ok.

This customer is very cross with us but realistically what more could we have done, the customer told us what quantity he wanted to order, we make out prices as clear as possible and we gave him chance to upgrade the quantity.

Any suggestions on a post card to Po Box……….!

Unfortunately I feel that we have lost any future orders from this customer but I do not feel it is our fault – thats life I guess! We obviously wish him all the best with another supplier in the future, perhaps he will think a little harder about which quantity to order in the future, just a shame we are penalised as he did not do this for us.