OHSHIT REPORT: We didn't ship enough Daelmans Jumbo Caramel Stroopwafels

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Background

On Wednesday, December 9th 2020 we sold Daelmans Jumbo Caramel Stroopwafels.

We sold them as 96-packs. We took 731 orders for 791 of the 96-packs (some customers bought multiple 96-packs) for a total of 75,936 stroopwaffels.

Shipping

Our warehouse team is running multiple and extended shifts for the holiday season and generally working around the clock. We typically wait until the day after our meh.com daily deals end before we ship orders in order to maximize efficiency. However, this close to Christmas we’ll grab groups of orders for early processing to increase the chances customers in extended delivery areas get their orders by Christmas.

On 12/9/2020 11:29am CT we grabbed a group of these orders earlier than normal to process. On 12/9/2020 12:56pm CT we printed the shipping labels. By 12/9/2020 2:41pm CT we had some of these loaded on FedEx trailer 5210942.

Delivery

For this deal, our standard shipping was FedEx SmartPost. We also offered an enhanced shipping upgrade option that we shipped FedEx Ground for an extra $2.99. 17 customers took us up on the enhanced shipping upgrade option.

Because we shipped some orders early and because some customers upgraded to enhanced shipping we started seeing some deliveries as early as 12/11/2020. It was at that point where we saw some comments in the forum like this one.

WTF. Got my package today. Only 24 in the box. Not 96. Where’s my stroopwafles?

Investigation

We began investigation about what went wrong 12/11/2020 3:52pm CT after we saw five similar support cases and a tweet.

By 12/11/2020 5:43pm CT we had figured out the root cause. The Daelmans Jumbo Caramel Stroopwafels were delivered to our warehouse in case packs containing four boxes of 24 stroopwaffels for a total of 96 stroopwaffels in each case pack. We intended to ship the case pack, but instead we broke down the case pack and shipped the box of 24 stroopwaffels.

We intended to ship 75,936 stroopwaffels but only shipped 18,984. OHSHIT.

Here’s a photo from the warehouse:

Solution

At this point we knew we needed to send all customers 72 more stroopwaffels for each unit they purchased. We also knew we needed to do it quickly so we could ship the remaining 56,952 stroopwaffels as soon as possible.

By 12/11/2020 6:31pm CT we had modified the original deal on meh.com to indicate the item we originally shipped was a 24-pack and we added an additional item of a 72-pack.

By 12/11/2020 6:59pm CT we had written a custom script to place an additional free order that included a 72-pack for each unit purchase.

By 12/11/2020 7:07pm CT that script completed the creation for all the additional free orders of 72-packs.

We started processing these in the warehouse on 12/12/2020 6:15am CT. By 12/12/2020 7:06am CT we were printing the shipping labels and by 12/12/2020 9:18am CT we had these loaded on a truck.

Hope we get these stroopwaffels to you all soon.