With the recent removal of the de-minimis trade thresholds by the Trump administration we have been forced to migrate our entire business system to a different service provider. The reason for this was that our old provider simply was not prepared for this change and could not support processing DDE Tariff payments on goods sold to the USA.
So whilst we tried very hard to negotiate a fix with our provider, after six weeks we have come to the conclusion that they simply were not up to the task. So we made the very hard decision to migrate our business to a different ERP systems integration provider.
ERP inter-what? What's all that about?
Our entire business is run on a software platform that is used to manage all aspects of the business. Commonly known an ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning, it handles manufacturing, procurement, accounting, compliance, maintenance, quality, communications, support and anything else you can think of. It's the glue that ties literally every aspect of our business together. The eCommerce bit you you see in your browser is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
So to transfer all of that data and workflows across from the old system to the new system is a massive job, and one that we've been working around the clock to get finished.
Unfortunately right now, we're still not finished
Yup. Despite the fact that you are now looking at a new website, and it kinda looks like it's done, we still have a bunch of work to go before we are fully 100% back up and running again. We have got most of the customer facing stuff done, but still have a bunch of products to add, and we still have to finalise the shipping aspect so that we can process Tariff payments from the web store.
But. We are not too far away from getting those things up and running, and can now manually process payments and shipping. So if you are a US customer that has been waiting to purchase goods from us, you can contact us via the link on each product page and we can manually create an invoice for you.
We decided to go live with the new site earlier than we might otherwise have done just so that we can start to service US customers again.
What else is new???
There's actually a metric fuck-ton of new stuff. Probably the biggest one for existing customers is the new ticketing system. Fortunately all old tickets had been closed out, but if you want to create a new ticket you now do that from the help menu above.
We also have a new forum. I still need to work out how to migrate the old data across, but will get that done in due course.
Of course, customer support has not changed apart from that.
Thanks for your patience
It goes without saying that we are massively disappointed that we have not been able to support our US customers for the past six weeks and we thank them for their patience.
Moving forwards we also thank everybody in advance whilst we work though getting everything else back up and running and get to grips with a brand new system and brand new way of doing things.
There is no doubt that there are going to be some teething troubles, so please bear with us whilst we figure it all out.
Thanx. J.B.