Thank you very much to everyone who has been kindly waiting patiently with the recent delays. We're excited to announce we've managed to address the biggest issues that were causing a delay in our usual workflow at ZenMarket, we expect delays to come to an end and be able to be back to normal service times by the end of July.
Some new measures we've adopted to vastly improve our response times to the unexpected moving forwards include:
- Reorganized the entire storage layout of our warehouses to store, pick and pack items more efficiently even when we get close to maximum storage capacity (more here)
- Restructured our warehouse teams and updated our system for dealing with new requests. Thus making sure there is always a dedicated staff member assigned and processing items at each stage of an item's warehouse journey, reducing delays in items being processed.
- Hired and trained additional staff (with even more additions to warehouse staff coming soon) to make sure that we won't be short-staffed during unforeseen events or occurrences in the future.
- Additional shifts. We have increased the number of working days and paid hours for the warehouse staff so they are able to process ALL of the current packing requests and orders
- We adopted additional shipping services (DHL eCommerce, Pony Express, ECMS) to successfully ship out the excess of parcels stuck at the warehouse due to JP Post's current shipping limitations to some countries and created additional space to work on what really matters to you (packing and handling!)
We had started offering 120 days of free storage as an aid to customers who were unable to ship items during the COVID-19 situation.
Unfortunately, this created an unexpected problem when the postal services decided to return many of the parcels we had accounted for as "sent," and flooded our warehouses at a time when many of our workers were on leave to appropriately self-isolate and attend to personal issues brought about by the global pandemic and previous state of emergency declaration in Japan.
We never meant to inconvenience you, and always, always, tried our best to resolve any internal issues and stay in contact with everyone who has ordered through our service.
We're deeply sorry if you have already been waiting for weeks for your items to be packed and sent.
From this week, all new additions to our operations will go into effect and you can expect us to address all of the current delayed requests in order and should be back to a normal schedule by the end of the month.
So if you have a packing order in waiting, please expect it to be dealt with during these remaining two weeks of July.
Note that we will not be charging extra storage fees for parcels with packing "In Progress" or for paid parcels "Awaiting Shipping"
(However, while we are focusing our attention on addressing delays with item intake and packing, we ask that you please allow for some small delays in other ZenMarket services like answering to new inquiries or purchasing time-sensitive items so we can return to normal operations as quickly as possible.)
Thank you very much for your patience, for choosing us during these globally difficult times, for all your improvement suggestions, and for the encouragement to make it through. If you wish to know more about the latest updates, please also check the following previous blogs in case you missed them:
