What if a delivery is going to be late?

Tell the customer before they work it out for themselves, and tell us if it is serious. A customer who was warned is annoyed. A customer who was not is angry.

Your responsibility

Preparing and dispatching on time is yours. Once you accept an order, planning around the obvious obstacles is part of accepting it. Traffic at six in the evening. Rain in monsoon. A festival weekend when every courier is already booked.

Dispatch around peak times rather than through them.

When it is genuinely outside your control

Heavy rain, an accident on the route, a natural event, a courier failure. These happen and they are taken into account when an issue is reviewed. What is looked at is whether you planned sensibly and communicated quickly, not whether the weather cooperated.

What to do, in order

1. Call the customer. Tell them the new realistic time, not an optimistic one.
2. Update the order status so it reflects reality.
3. Write what happened in the order notes.
4. If it is a significant delay or the customer is upset, write to support@cakesify.com with the Order ID so we are not hearing it from them first.

The pattern to avoid

Repeated late deliveries affect your store performance and, more to the point, they stop people ordering again. A customer who gets a birthday cake an hour after the party started does not come back, whatever the reason was.