Hit 500 canceled orders in one quarter and finally understood why I was losing sleep

I work in customer service for a small online furniture store based in Portland, Oregon. Last quarter our cancellation numbers hit exactly 512, which is about triple what I expected. It really hit me when I realized I had personally processed over 200 of those cancellations because of delivery delays and missing parts. Has anyone else had a specific number like that make them stop and rethink how they handle things?

3 comments

3 Comments

sagep1926d ago

That's a brutal number to see on paper. Were most of those cancellations coming from the same delivery company or a handful of suppliers, or was it spread out across everyone you work with? I'm wondering if there's a single point of failure that's tanking your numbers. Getting to 512 means something is probably broken at a deeper level, not just bad luck on a few orders. Did you look at if the missing parts were all from one manufacturer or one type of furniture?

logan70526d ago

Hang on, 512 cancellations sounds more like a total number over time, not just from one supplier. You might be mixing up the cause with the effect there.

terryh2026d ago

Back when I had my shop in 2022, we hit 87 cancellations in one month and it drove me crazy until I figured out it was basically one vendor for wooden table legs that kept missing their shipping windows. Once I switched to two different suppliers for the same part, that number dropped to like 12 a month. @sagep19 is right that 512 suggests a bigger issue, probably worth digging into what product lines or manufacturers those cancellations center on. We had a similar thing with upholstered chairs where one fabric supplier was consistently late, and swapping them out fixed most of the problem.