Customer Service Basics
If you are using Art of Where drop shipping services for your online business, your customers will communicate with you directly via your store platform, by email or in person if you are selling offline. As the seller, it will be up to you to handle each question and concern your customers may have regarding your product line. Art of Where is acting as your manufacturer through drop shipping and does not come in direct contact with your customer. If you read through our FAQ and keep an eye on production and shipping times you will be able to answer your customers questions regarding products, fabrics, transit times, turn around times, fit and everything else related to the products you choose to offer.
Store Policies
If you are working with us for drop shipping, you will need to know the policies we work by. These are our guidelines as to the service we provide, limitations that there may be in our processes, as well as how we go about resolving issues. Our policies govern how we work with our customers; the people ordering from us either wholesale or for drop shipping. While you do not have to post our exact policies in your store, you will want to be very clear with your customer base as to how your store operates and what is OK and not OK. Creating your own strong policies and guidelines will help bring character and set you apart from other shops. It will also make it easier to resolve issues if/when they do arise.
If you would like to offer returns and/or exchanges to your customer, the best thing to do is order your products wholesale so you have them on hand, just like a brick & mortar store would, ready to ship out if the customer wants a different size or product. If a customer returns an item to you, you have it on hand to ship to the next customer that orders that exact item. Please note that if you do offer returns and exchanges, you need to provide your customers with your return shipping address, on your web site or by email. Art of Where does not offer returns or exchanges, and we cannot process those for you.
Customer Deadlines
At the moment, we don't offer express production. If you customer has a specific deadline, let us know when the deadline is and what they will be ordering and we will check on our current turnaround time for you. In most cases we can accommodate faster production and shipping, but there may be additional shipping fees if the order has to be sent express. These fees will be invoiced by email and the order can only ship once the invoice is paid. All express orders are noted in our system so they can be sent on the agreed upon date.
Ship Out
You can read about how we ship on our production and shipping page, as well as in our help section. We often get questions about what the customer receives in the package and how tracking works. We don't send packing slips unless the order is being sent outside the US and Canada, or if it's being sent to the US by courier (e.g. DHL). If your order includes tracking, we send you (our customer) the tracking number and it's up to you to send that information on to your client. If something happens to a package (damage or lost in transit), contact us and we will investigate. If a package is returned to us, we will look into why and contact you. If the error is ours, we will reship at no extra cost, if the error is a wrong address or the customer refused to accept the package, we will contact you and invoice by email for the reshipment if needed.
Exchanges
Because we are an on demand manufacturer, we don't have a stock room full of every size and design of each and every product. When your customer orders from you, and you in turn order from us, we are making the order from scratch and shipping it out. Unlike a traditional store, if your customer bought the wrong size, we don't have the product in stock ready to exchange. This is why it is extremely important that your customers understand the nature of print on demand. It's like pizza. If you ordered a large, and when it gets there you realize, oh it's too big, I need less pizza (sure....), you can't exchange it for a smaller one. The smaller one isn't there, ready to go, and the pizza place can't take back the large pie and send it out to a different customer.
Contacting Art of Where
You should absolutely get in touch with us if you or your customer received something that has a flaw or defect (e.g. a sewing error or print error). Please email us ([email protected]) with the AOW order number and include pictures of the issue. We will review and get back to you as soon as we can with a solution. To continue with the pizza analogy, if you ordered a small Hawaiian pizza and received a large pepperoni pizza, we will get you the pizza you originally ordered, even if some of us agree with the president of Iceland.
We hope all this information has been helpful! If you have any questions or comments about handling customer service for your store, please post in the comments below.
