Shipping overseas suspended due to cyber attacks.

[exxos]

Hmm, about people not entering their address properly... This might be hard to implement, but on some sites they default to an address search function that fills out all their postal details properly. Then there is an 'edit' function if required. I wonder if that's something you could get.

Chargeable service unfortunately. I did look it to it before. For the little I make on items it would end up costing me to sell stuff each month :( my girlfriend has to keep editing them, she's free, just annoys the hell out of her all the time that some people cannot do simple things :roll:

[exxos]

People please, this is getting ridiculous now. So for the 50th and last time I will write this!

FIRSTLY READ THE HUGE NOTICE AT THE TOP OF THE STORE!!

Ordering during that time means you have read and accepted shipping will be delayed!!.
Which nobody has read it seems.

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READ THIS THREAD FOR NEWS!
I wrote about these problems for weeks now! What is the point in me monitoring the shipping problems and writing in this thread when nobody reads it either ?

NO I CANNOT MAGICALLY SHIP YOUR ITEMS ANOTHER WAY!
I am looking into alternatives, but as I already wrote in this thread. I have no way to take custom payments. My girlfriend does the shipping, I do not live with her. She does not have a printer to print documents out. I don't have time to do custom orders or work out quotes then write 20+ emails to people with prices and wait for endless weeks to pay, or not. I did that with the H5 motherboard shipping and it dragged on for months. It was total chaos dealing with it all. It is something I do not want to repeat again sorry!

All the stock allocation and management is fully automated. I would have to do it all manually. With my RSI, no! Courier collection is not simple as neither myself or my girlfriend are in all day every day ( I do not live with her). My day job work can change hourly so I cannot turn work away to wait in all day for courier to pickup packages. Also no, I am not looking into drop off boxes and driving miles either. If I was making £100's per order profit then it would be worth my time. But I make almost NOTHING profit wise on items which are sold. I already give away all my free time for Atari stuff, I am not going to do more free work sorry!

WE ARE STILL SHIPPING UK ORDERS!
The cyber attacks did not affect UK shipping, only overseas shipping, which is USA, EU etc!

OVERSEAS ORDERS ARE NO LONGER BEING ACCEPTED.
Exactly why we stopped accepting overseas orders because I knew I would keep getting emails about orders not being shipped. I knew I would keep getting emails about it. I knew a lot of people would never read what it says in the store. So this is why I am not accepting overseas orders until the cyber attack situation is resolved.

IS THERE NO WAY TO SHIP OVERSEAS ?
Sure, find someone in UK who will order within the UK and then forward the items to you. Then you delegate with them about shipping prices and taking payments etc. Also note my responsibility for lost items also ends when it arrives to UK address.

AND THE REST
Frankly I want to take a long rest from all things Atari related. I am sick and tired of the repetitive BS which I have to deal with every day. I need to concentrate on paying my bills not writing a new webstore to ship items different ways. There is ALWAYS something more important/urgent which needs my attention. Every week! I start something, then I have to stop to do something else. Then half way though that project, A new week starts and I have to start some other huge project which is more urgent. Then by the end of the year, I have 100's of unfinished things which need to get done but likely never will. So I am not going to start anything else until what I started 3 weeks ago is finished. Sorry!

I am in a impossible situation which is why I took down overseas shipping in my store. If you are one of those people who did not read anything, and your order has not yet shipped (no tracking code) then send me your order number and I will cancel your order and refund in full. As I am not god, I cannot solve huge problems overnights, I am one person!! Yeah life suck, you cannot get your items, I am sorry, but life does suck and this is what happens when we depend on 3rd party companies! You will have to have some patience I'm afraid until its all resolved. Or someone pays me a good hourly rate to make getting the store back online with alternative shipping methods. It will likely take some weeks.

I am no longer going to update this thread. Waste of time. I will only post when overseas shipping is resumed. If anyone wants to know current news then GOOGLE IT!

I EVEN PUT NOTES ON THE TRACKING PAGES ABOUT THIS!

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Tracking links are given after checkout! Assuming you did not write it down then you follow THIS POST. You can even recover your tracking in your usecontrol panel as outline in THIS POST.

So no, the tracking page will not show any tracking until I am cable to ship items! Again why I cannot use a different courier as the tracking system will be totally broken with a different courier!

[exxos]

Here's a roundup of what has been going on in the background.

Firstly I've been talking continuously to 2 different other courier companies basically. The whole thing was ultimately pointless. It is one of those things where they on the face of it , they offer better services at cheaper prices. While this is true, it is not portraying the full facts and in reality unless you are sending thousands of packages then it actually works out at twice the cost. Unfortunately I spent the entire past week programming scripts to interface to their API system to automatically get prices and quotes only to find it was a total waste of time :cussing:

Also packages sent by Royal mail from the 10th are still stuck in a UK depot. I'm not convinced packages are moving despite Royal mail saying otherwise. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about packages which are stuck in transit currently.These are packages which have already received a tracking number.

We have a small backlog of overseas orders currently. Anywhere within Europe to the USA etc. What I'm going to try and do is ship them with Evri over the next week or so. Currently the tracking numbers will not work because the store system and tracking system are all coded for Royal mail tracking information. But I will try and fix this over the next week or so as well.

I'm also working to integrate Evri into my store. Unfortunately this will take considerable time because they do not have any pricelists. There are literally tens of thousands of combinations of countries / parcel sizes / weights etc, all to be calculated and entered into the store quotation system. This isn't a 5 minute job.

I will be working on these problems in the background over the next few weeks. The store will still be open currently for UK orders but I will likely have to take it off-line to do the coding changes at some point soon. Also because part of the store code is integrated into the forum, the forum may intermittently crash while I'm testing out updates and code changes. If that happens afraid you will just have to wait them out. Hopefully any crashes will only be momentarily.

Unfortunately this is going to soak up the entirety of my free time, so I'll not have any time whatsoever for the forum / replying to people / Adding items into the store etc, sorry!

[exxos]

All outstanding orders have now been booked for collection by Evri on Monday 13th.

Unfortunately there is no tracking information until I can update the store code. I hope I can this over the next few days. The usual emails and tracking pages / links will be updated as normal when the code is updated.

Also I cannot make heads nor tails of documents which may or may not be needed to EU countries. So I don't know if it will cause issues for people or not. So if people can let me know what happens... If EU countries become a nightmare then I won't ship items to EU again until royal mail is fully operational.

[exxos]

I am looking at Google's address validation API next. It took us over 2 hours to book several packages yesterday due to various problems with addresses people enter. We just don't have time to do everything manually like this all the time. It is always many many hours unpaid work for myself and my girlfriend to do. As I said before, correcting peoples addresses takes up a lot of time already. So the API to sort it all out is the only thing I can do. How accurate / reliable this will be, no idea. But people can edit manually still.

The usual duplicated / missing information is where it all fails. We cannot know peoples apartment number! If people miss a part of the address off, such as building / apartment number etc, we won't know and send packages as the user input. If people don't know where they live, they shouldn't expect us or the postman to know either! People need to stop being lazy and check their inputs!! So we will no longer manually correct addresses. If they bounce back to us, then the user must then repay the postage costs plus a £5 fee to manually process the repeat order. I also do not have time to go chasing people of such problems. It is up to the user to monitor tracking and inform me when there is a problem. Most of the time people don't check tracking and miss delivery, or incomplete address and return to us anyway. In both cases postage must be repaid along with manual processing fee.

This is all more work for me as usual. I will have to reprogram a large chunk of my store in order to integrate the planned changes. This will take some weeks. We will ultimately run Evri and Royalmail postal systems, assuming the package we sent out yesterday arrive without problems. The first step is continue to use RM for UK orders and Evri for overseas. Though shipping locations and prices can change between Evri and RM. So there may be a choice for users to select for courier. RM packages I think will be more expensive, but we can ship 3 or 4 times a week. Evri can be cheaper, but collection can only be Mondays. This is basically "speed vs price" selection. Sometimes RM may be cheaper, but until the database is created, its difficult to know currently.

Hopefully RM will get running meanwhile. Though I have to assume they are not running until packages we sent out on the 10th start arriving at destinations. I will not risk peoples orders in that system until it is proven to be stable. Currently I am not convinced at all.

[exxos]

The Evri tracking system is now online. Totally untested of course but AFAIK it is functioning fine.

Outstanding orders from the 10th should all now have tracking numbers starting with EVR. As mentioned above, they should be collected tomorrow. It is possible Evri may also send tracking updates directly to you via email. Currently I don't know.

The usual emails have been sent out though direct tracking links are no longer sent in the emails. They now are directed to the main tracking page as illustrated in THIS POST. That tracking page should direct you to either Royal mail or Evri tracking pages.

I've also updated the forum User Control Panel code. So you can now get the Evri tracking information as usual there as well.

[exxos]

I give up.

Evri failed to collect the packages over 3 days now :headbang: :cussing: I can't wait around all week on the chance they will pickup. They are just not going to be reliable.

So unfortunately I will likely just have to refund the orders which are outstanding as there is just no simple / cost effective ways to ship items.

I've spent the past few weeks frantically trying to find solutions and spent many hours writing code to interface to postal systems and the only thing its accomplished is making my hands hurt. So I'm sorry people, I tried I really did. But I can't keep doing this as its giving no results.

Plus every time I try and take some time off I get lumped with even more work. Enough is enough. I wanted to take some time off end of 2019 but the world went even more to crap and nothing has improved since. So I'm just not getting roped into any more drama. I don't get paid for all this crap and it isn't fun either. So I'm taking a break and the world will have to cope without me for once.

[grumpyboomer]

I am willing to wait it out, no worries.

[exxos]

My girlfriend came back from posting a UK order just and the guy behind the counter said overseas orders are starting to move again now! I checked some delayed orders from around the 10th and they have left the UK and arrived around Europe.

So I hope next week we can FINALLY post overseas orders. I will also reopen the store to accept overseas orders sometime next week! Please note shipping will likely be very slow from leaving the UK.

As said before, I'm busy with life stuff right now and need to take a rest from the forum and the world of Atari. So I won't be around much for the next few weeks.

[p0ke]

Hello,

Got my package today (20 Feb 2023) (ordered 10th of Jan 2023).

Hope it will help people forcasting package arrival.

p0ke