Very poorly organized service

I saw a Facebook ad for Huel on Tuesday 2/20 morning, looked into it a bit, and then placed an order before 12 central time that day. I wasn’t even in the market for it but figured I would try it anyway.

I have a simple order… just 2 vanilla starter pack. Nobody expects Huel to have the shipping abilities of Amazon, but maybe it’s not wise to advertise you have same day shipping…

I emailed Huel Thursday and got the generic cut and paste explanation Huel provides in the forum and in emails about “shipping orders by groups” and my order is expected to be processed in 1 or 2 business days. This is really not an explanation at all. It appears Huel has no idea about order status. Does Huel really not have a system in place to track an order? And why are customers not given automatic status updates on delays.

To be honest, Im not even in a rush to get the stuff. It’s just annoying to have an on line transaction that’s not even handled as well as someone selling used stuff on Ebay.

Just change your website’s statement on same day shipping and upgrade the shipping on orders that are delayed …

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Yeah, I’m not super impressed so far either, sadly. I placed my first order on 2/22, got a shipping notification on 2/23, but the UPS tracking number provided still shows “A UPS shipping label has been created” and nothing else.

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I’ve ordered twice. First order took about 5 days from time I placed order till time I got it on front door. I went ahead and placed a second order which has has a shipping label created but not actually taken to the UPS facility yet. Granted, I ordered on Thursday, the label was created on Friday, and so over the weekend their facility is probably not open. So I would expect it to actually be shipped today or tomorrow, likely. Maybe. (I ordered about 10 days before my supply was to run out.)

I think part of the confusion, and this is just one man’s opinion, has to do with the delay between creation of shipping label and actually being received by the UPS facility in their area. Since labels are generated the day after an order is placed, it can give the customer a false sense of timing. Customer sees that and assumes it was actually shipped. But that’s just the label. There appears to be some kind of stacking process where they actually take packages to UPS in batches.

If you log on to your Huel account and go to your orders, you can actually click on the UPS tracking and it takes you to UPS’s site. It will tell you if they actually received the outgoing package or if the label itself was created.

My order just says Unfulfilled…

Hi @Deron @shoujokakumei

Simple label creation and package preparation doesn’t mean it’s been shipped. That doesn’t happen until the package actually sees movement, which doesn’t begin until the package was handed to UPS for the first scan.

We expect your orders to update within 1-2 business days.

-Sothan

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Just a thought, maybe y’all ought to change your system to not send out “your shipment is on the way” emails until things are actually shipped. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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@Sothan_Huel yeah that’s cool. I understand the process now, and that’s why I ordered my second shipment far ahead of time before running out of my first.

I guess what I was getting at is that it might be better to only update the order status once it’s actually shipped. Don’t even change order status until that happens. Don’t even notify the customer the label was generated. Or, perhaps different wording. For example, once the label is generated, the order is listed as “Fulfilled”. Perhaps changing that to “Waiting to ship” or “pending shipping” instead of fulfilled might cut down on confusion. Just brainstorming ideas here.

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I received my Huel last night after Sothan jumped through a few hoops to make it happen after the initial order snafu. Hopefully the shipping section of the company gets back on track soon…

Tried it today for the first time- vanilla. Didn’t taste bad, i’ll stick with it. I Was still a little hungry 2 hrs later but hopefully will get into a system where my body gets used to it for lunch…

Thanks again for your assistance Sothan,

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Hi @NLNYC

Glad you got your order!

Thank you for giving time speak earlier this week.

You can reach me directly at sothan@huel.com if you have further questions.

Have a great weekend!

I placed my first order on February 28th (late in the day) after seeing an advertisement for it on Instagram. I’ve been juicing for a while for lunches and thought it would be a nice alternative for a while. Plus, I have a pretty on-the-go life and thought the shakes might help me eat better during the day.

It is now March 5 and my order still says ‘unfulfilled’. I have to say, as a brand new customer, I’m also feeling a bit unfulfilled. I hope my first experience and some of the comments I have been reading this afternoon in the forum are not indicative of future experiences.

Hi @bikeshopguy,

I apologize for your experience thus far. It looks like your order is queue to be shipped today.

It looks like the order was placed after our cut off time and combination of the weekend caused your order to take longer to process.

I will reach out to you private to answer any concerns regarding your order.

-Sothan

Same issue. Basically, don’t advertise same day shipping if all you’re going to do is print a label off and let it sit there for several days until you feel like taking it to Fed-Ex. When you check the tracking number, Fed-Ex gives you an estimated time of arrival. That’s based on someone actually shipping the product on the day they print a label. I’m not sure what the psychology is behind just having a bunch of packages ready to ship, but not actually shipping them unless you’re purposefully wanting it to take a week to receive a product that I could drive to Texas, pick up, and drive back two or three times already by then. haha Figure it out.

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