How laptop delivery breaks
This page explains some common problems that might be the reason for your XO not having arrived yet. For an explanation of how laptop delivery was hypothetically supposed to work, see How laptop delivery works.
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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1. The initial shipping address was a PO Box. Brightstar's contract with FedEx doesn't allow shipping to PO Boxes. When it was first discovered that Paypal orders could have PO Boxes as their shipping addresses, and that many Give One Get One donors had used these, the first response was that staffers at Patriot (who already didn't have enough time/people to answer the calls they were getting) should call or email the affected donors to get a non-PO-Box address. Needless to say, many of these donors were never contacted.
The second, and apparently current, solution was for Brightstar to open a special account with UPS, which will be able deliver to PO Boxes, which may resolve the problem for donors affected by this issue.
2. The shipping address contained more than one address line. An severe bug in the fulfillment software (of unknown origin, but likely at Patriot) caused many Give One Get One donors who paid via Paypal and other indirect means to have their shipping addresses truncated in the Patriot shipping database. This happened if the street address had more than one line - as, for example, anyone who tried to ship to their work address "care of" their company's name. This apparently affected a huge number of donor's orders.
For example, a hypothetical G1G1 Donor "Nick" might have had his normal work address transmitted from Paypal to Patriot as:
Nick Blancoputty c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc 1234 Scrod Lane Boston, MA 10506
But in the Patriot database, and therefore in the Brightstar shipment database, it would have been recorded only as:
Nick Blancoputty c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc Boston, MA 10506
...which obviously is not a valid shipping address. The problem can also manifest in other ways, more subtle. For example, an original address:
Nick Blancoputty 1234 Scrod Lane Apartement 123, Building 4 Boston, MA 10506
...would have been recorded as simply::
Nick Blancoputty 1234 Scrod Lane Boston, MA 10506
While this passes validation as a shippable address, it is missing vital information (building, apartment, or suite number; also, company mail stop number). This cause the package to be lost, or rejected, as the simple street address could be a high rise apartment or office building with many tenants.
There has been much comment online concerning this problem, especially among the donors whose shipments were or still are affected by it. That the problem:
- existed in a modern order-fulfillment system in the first place;
- was not corrected by Patriot or OLPC after it was found (eg, by going back to the source Paypal confirmation data to retrieve the missing address fields from the orders);
- was never acknowledged by Patriot or OLPC (eg, by claiming all address issues were caused by PO Boxes - see above)
and that
- donors who were affected by the problem were never pro-actively contacted to explain and correct the situation;
- that due to a severe lack of systems and database coordination between Patriot and Brightstar, many donors found it impossible to correct their addresses even after repeated calls and emails to Patriot;
...have all been great sources of frustration for a large number of individuals still without their XOs, despite having ordered very early in the Give One Get One program.
Donors affected by this issue have little recourse other than to contact Patriot to attempt to get a shippable address in the system. There have been reports that this process has been successful for some, but not for the majority, of those in this category. (See (5) below.)
3. FedEx might not have been able to deliver to the address given. If the laptop is returned as unable to deliver or is part of an RMA (replacement request), it goes directly to Brightstar. Unfortunately, Brightstar doesn't have email addresses or the ability to send out messages to donor base. Notifications about the shipment or return have to go back to Patriot to get sent out to donors. This takes a long time, and there are a number of bottlenecked-up places where things could get lost along the way.
4. There have been reports and speculation that the online address-verification system being used by Brightstar and/or Patriot (1) is much too sensitive to small variations in addresses, (2) has a high "false-negative" rate (i.e., flagging an address as unshippable when it's actually fine), and (3) was only intended by FedEx to be used as a tool for address correction, not as a bright-line test for whether an address can truly be shipped to or not. The use of this system for other than its intended purpose could conceivably be explained by Brightstar's unfamiliarity and relative inexperience with delivery of products directly to end-user addresses.
Donors affected by this issue may be able to resolve their problems by specifying an alternate shipping address that the verification tool approves of.
5. Address changes and corrections taken by customer service may not have been received or processed by Brightstar. As mentioned in (2) above, the customer service contractor for OLPC (Patriot) and the shipping contractor (Brightstar) do not share a common database or have access to a common order fulfillment system, as would be the industry norm. Order changes (such as corrections to shipping addresses) taken by Patriot are reportedly transmitted to Brightstar by the sending of single email messages, one email per change. If this is true, there are obviously a large number of places such a system could fail and the corrected address not be processed by Brightstar.
Donors affected by this issue may have no recourse but to keep contacting Patriot by phone (reportedly more effective than email, which is rarely answered or acknowledged by them) in the hope that one of the changes will eventually "take".