Merc Network.....

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Breakdown of web orders transferred to pos

carol said:
There was a delay in receiving website orders at about 5pm. .cleared up about 2 hours later with no problems.
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February 12 and 13 we had almost no orders sent to us from our web site to our POS system. We had to go to the web portal and print them out one by one. Each order we had to log in a second time to view the credit card information and hand writes the credit card #. Every order had to be typed into our POS system. The format they print out from the portal is hard to read.
I n generally I like my FTD web site and the support staff at FTD but this was a castrophic system failure that should have never happened. They should have been ready for the holiday.
 
4,380+ Days Andnever Been Down For 1 Minute!!

bluebonnet said:
Mikey,
Here's what they told me......... I'm sooooooo pissed right now! This has been all day. But yet other smaller towns have called and told me I need to hook my merc up! After umteen phone calls finally a tech told me that all high-speed intranet members a gadget that is connected to host is down and that is what they are working on. So I asked.... if someone is paying $12.99 for a land-line they get better service? and I'm paying $80 for cable? That just does not make since! He then tells me all I can say is we are working on it , mam! God! I just wanted to ring his neck!!!!
I am so glad I'm going with MAS after the holiday, hopefully it will be the last one I have to deal with on break downs before a Holiday. I do not eveeeeeen neeeeeeed this stress!!!! and the stress free music is loud today!
Frustrated another Holiday but the last!
Cyndi
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4,380+ DAYS ANDNEVER BEEN DOWN FOR 1 MINUTE!! Now that is a system worth looking into. Tom Carlson, 608-755-7700
 
I caught this post on a BB from a distraught lady.
hubby might be losing his job soon, he works for FTD and they had a MAJOR screw-up on Valentine's Day when thier hardware failed and they LOST half the orders for the ENTIRE COUNTRY. so 7,000 florists had all these flowers and no idea where they had to go.
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Don't want to post a link there because the board is related to a debilitating disease and she is very upset. No need for florists to jump in and make her life worse, but I found her comment interesting.
 
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CHR said:
I caught this post on a BB from a distraught lady.

Don't want to post a link there because the board is related to a debilitating disease and she is very upset. No need for florists to jump in and make her life worse, but I found her comment interesting.
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I want to say something, but I don't know where to start.

Cathy, ty, for this post.

joe
 
Found out today, all employees had to work an overtime shift of 4 hours yesterday to clean the mess up!! With one emp. tackling over 300 reimbursements back to consumers because of the system down....Now , I have done some major figuring and I will leave it up to y'alls calculators, mine doesn't go up that high! You take 300 orders @ say $100 a pop, times emps at HQ all working 4 hour shifts, think of the money lost! A lot of shops were calling because the orders on their side were going thru but not on the receiver's end, as well as all dotcom orders were going thru on their end but fillers didn't receive them. Terrible and so sad....

To add to this sad situation, think of all the consumers that now have a bad image of the floral industry regardless if they went thru dotcom or a shop using technology! That means now we have to work extremely hard to get them to buy from an actual shop and do more actual phone calling, not relying on technology that we all have taken for granted.
Let alone all the ones that will pay for it as an escape goat that is let go, like Cathy had found on a forum.

This is almost like a BLACK SUNDAY, but called (BLACK VALENTINE'S DAY 2007) instead.

Such a sad start for a New Year.

Cyndi
 
CHR said:
So could the logo become a liability for florists after this V Day debacle?
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It became a liability long ago...

Many would say it happened when Norton came on board... MY opinion is it happened the day he left!

Read a blast from the past HERE yep... Norton's laughing STILL!
 
From the people responding to this it sounds like it was the 'new' technology not the old that was on the blink.. Bloomz & I are both on dial up modems and I really did not see a problem.. so far I have had only 2 problems.. it sounds like it was those on cable or that new 'merc direct' that had the issues.. Isn't merc direct done on the web thru cable or dsl?? and I haven't heard of anyone on dsl having a problem..so was it only those on cable connectionis??

So maybe the old technology is working better than the new technology.

Hey John S... bet you are glad you are no longer there..
 
I just checked with two shops who I sent orders to, both here in the state. Both received the orders (sent on the 12th and 13th) Thank goodness, seems like we avoided non-deliveries on orders that went out from us ...phew!
 
carol said:
it sounds like it was those on cable or that new 'merc direct' that had the issues.. Isn't merc direct done on the web
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I use cable to connect to the web, has nothing to do with what FTD does...

It does appear it was their web based applications, but still for all those orders that to florists using it, even if they were from those on dial up it created an issue!
 
If anyone would care to write an article/summary of the Merc issues during V-Day, I'd be happy to publish it on the RF Blog.

Consumers might be interested to know how it effected their orders, how FTD communicated the problems to florists, how shops tried to deal it, and how a flower buyer could avoid being caught up in flower tech hell next time.

This could include both .com orders as well as those sold through FTD-hosted websites.

Maybe a couple folks could collaborate since most only could see a tiny piece of the larger problem.

Might be interesting to create a poll as to how many or what percentage of orders went unfulfilled by the 14th due to the breakdown.
 
As far as we knew, everything here went out....

But we have started hearing about non deliveries and as we check are now hearing "We never received any orders,... or price changes... or cancellations... or whatever." I do know that some of my delivery confirmations were still going out this morning, and that we had one customer whose debit card was charged for a canceled sale when he found out the sale would drive him to overdrawn!... and it did when the cancellation did not go through the system even though we did not charge him here! Fortunately it was a local bank and we were able to talk directly to the processing clerk, one of our customers.

Since Mas can't (or wont) use our existing equipment, we are actively looking for someone who has a software system that can and will let us use our investment, and depart from FTD.
 
Although called overkill and unecessary, I was very glad to have 2 wire services available this week. Spent a lot of time fielding calls from florists, all very paniced ,that were trying to figure out who had recieved their outwires and who had not. You could not pay me to be an FTD employee! I am thinking I am not going to see our rep this year.
 
We started the holiday on DSL and serious problems for two days, with FTD telling us it was our fault. We were fortunate enough to still have the old equipment sitting there so we went back to the good ol modem--which worked fine the rest of the holiday. We invested a good amount of time, effort and money in moving our system to dsl and to have it fail us during the holiday is a joke.
 
Also.....the problems with the merc would have had the biggest affect on the order gather....would it not? Real florists can still call an order through to another shop. I think this will hurt the .com businesses the most. Don't get me wrong, I realize the hell it created for real florists too.
 
Bigted said:
We invested a good amount of time, effort and money in moving our system to dsl and to have it fail us during the holiday is a joke.
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Keep in mind, it was FTD that failed and not your systems... totally their stuff!
 
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