Summary of chichen manure April delivery and ordering issues

加跟贴 发新贴

Thank you all for your patience during the April delivery. That was the first Spring delivery in many years. Our gardeners are growing: the first time we ordered we had only 1/2 truck, and the past year we had 3 trucks (2 from Autumn/Winter and 1 in Spring). We expect to have even more in the coming year.

The last delivery exposed some problems.

1. Timing of order.

In the Spring, the factory is busy with manure/mulch packing, they hardly have time to pack chicken manure, which is now a very small business for them. Due to tightening rules on environmental protection, which affect farm use of chicken manure, the factory only receives small chicken manure order. If we want our products delivered before spring gardening time, we need to give the factory order at least in January.

2. Do we need a firm deadline?

Some people are not comfortable that their orders got reduced because people came late are given some bags. That was not a problem previously, because we do not have many new orders after the deadline. We can improve this by

1). publish dates we expect to close for new orders so that people can place orders early.

2). close the web site for new orders if there are too many new orders after reaching the limit.

We do not want to close the web site right after it reaches the limit. Based on previous experience, there are always people giving up their orders at the last minute, so the people who ordered late actually helped us to solve the problem. That's why we call it "Co-op" (互助).

3. Pickup related issues

1). pick up without permission: we had an incident this time that a person who was not on our list picked up 30+ bags, before Zhang Han even reached home. Zhang Han and others (thanks!) had to give some of their own to people who came to pick up their assigned bags.

2). parking on other properties: some people parked on neighbors' drive ways without permission, causing trouble to the neighbor. Please note: the neighbors are already doing us a favor, no matter they are willingly doing so or not. We should appreciate and do not cause more inconvenience for them.

4. Order/pickup for other people

The motivation for the online system was to make things easy so that we do not need to track orders manually. If you order for others, but do not pickup together, you force us to go back to the manual tracking, which sometimes causes errors. The 30+ bags wrongly taken I mentioned above was probably caused by a group order, and in the end it caused trouble for many people. We do not want it to happen again.

We understand that many people are not familiar with computer and if you are ordering for them, we as well as those being helped, will appreciate greatly, because that's exactly the spirit of helping each other (互助) . We would also appreciate if you can supply the host family a list of people and bags before the delivery date.

Finally, the database was cleared after the April delivery. If you ordered last time and did not get enough bags, you need to order again (use modify order link to save time).

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