Christmas is two days away and Glowforge appears to be the Grinch this year…
Spent time considering this purchase (since it’s rather large) and took the plunge on 12/08/2019 when the website was still clearly advertising that by ordering at that time, I would receive my Glowforge before the holiday. $6K spent.
The next day, I check my order status to see that my “Expected Delivery Date” is 12/20/2019. GREAT! As the 20th is a Friday, I take the day off of work so that I am sure that I’ll be there to sign/receive. They were still advertising pre-holiday deliveries for days after I ordered.
I keep checking my status and my UPS and FedEx accounts and see nothing heading my way.
The 20th comes and goes and I still have no idea when the $6000 item I ordered will even ship. I check this morning and it still shows as “UNFULFILLED” (an accurate description of my order) and still shows an Expected Delivery Date of 12/20/2019…even though it’s now the 23rd. What a pathetic order tracking/fulfillment/customer service system that Glowforge has “created”. They have no idea when they will be able to ship ANYTHING but they feel free to make promises about EVERYTHING!
I sure hope the cutter is of higher quality than the level of customer service this company provides. If not, I expect that the Glowforge will simply explode upon startup and incinerate everything in my house…including me.
The irony of the demand at Christmas time deprives you of a wonderful tool but then proves that it seems to be something a lot of people want.
Don’t worry about quality. It is a great machine. It won’t burn your house down unless you try something outside of normal operating conditions and walk away. Nothing in the history of problems have indicated fires from just turning it on.
Shipping communication and support communication in general is a lag. That is probably the clearest indication that we are dealing with a young company that is very small. We expect customer service as if it is a Fortune 500 company.
Who knows, people have been surprised to find a Glowforge delivered without any indication in the usual sources. I hope your expectations get fulfilled, especially because it is such a cool machine.
It won’t help your situation but just for the sake of education, the GF team doesn’t actually ship these machines. They receive periodic stock and production data from the manufacturer, and use that to provide a shipping estimate. They have no way to know when an individual purchase will ship.
It’s not ideal and, as stated, support can appear to be lacking, but they do care about their customers and strive to make things right. It’s also worth waiting for.
I am aware of their terrible business model and their use of a 3rd-party manufacturer. I don’t care. I want to know when my cutter which I paid $6000 for will arrive at my home. Not a crazy thing to want to know. The fact that I am not the first person to run into these issues tells me that Glowforge does not care to fix their broken system - they are just trying to collect as much $$$ as possible. I DIDN’T DONATE MONEY TO A CHARITY AND I DIDN’T PARTAKE IN A KICKSTARTER PROJECT - I WANT THE PRODUCT THAT I PAID FOR!!!
I too have an ongoing problem with GF. Their customer service is worse than lacking. They only respond to e-mails once a day, and it really could take lifetime to resolve any issues. One simple phone call in my case might have resolved 5 days worth of e-mails. Thus, I sent an e-mail to cancel the purchase.
I would suggest to GF that they stop selling machines until they can service their current customers. Are they so greedy that they do not care about customer service? What a poor way to run a company.
There may be 20,000 machines out there, and maybe most owners are happy, but from reading on this community website, it seems that there are quite a few here who are not happy. So while, I am glad you are happy, and good for you, for the rest of us, this is a sad and unhappy experience. Please do not make light of the problems others are having.
Not making light of anything. Just saying denying future owners of the enjoyment of this machine is not a solution. Sorry you don’t have time to wait, but I’m sure one of the other products on the market will make you happy.
They do, actually. The ODM they have that’s doing their manufacturing knows exactly how many units they expect to yield per week. The ODM has to manage the supply chain and the personnel required to do the work and they don’t want to pay for inventory or people they don’t need, nor do they want to be short of these resources. If they know what they’re doing, they know this stuff with a fairly high degree of precision. That information would also be available to GF. The rest is pretty simple math.
I don’t know why GF can’t manage their order/delivery process better than they do, but it’s not an issue that can’t be overcome, it’s just that they either can’t or won’t feel it’s a high enough priority to address.
I feel like I have a pretty good picture of you. You can tell a lot about people via the forum, it shows you who they are pretty quickly.
It’s too bad you’re opting out, this is a nice community; on the other hand it seems like you might be happier elsewhere, who are we to say. Good luck.
Let me explain, since I believe there are people here who are making judgments about me, and know nothing about my problem with GF. There is no reason to be rude to me. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. I am unhappy with GF. I am not unhappy with any of you. You do not know how you would have reacted had this happened to you, so don’t judge me.
Upon opening my machine, I saw that there was a huge crack in the plastic housing of the machine, and a hole in the plastic. The shipping box is not dented. The piece from the hole is not in the box. This leads me to believe the machine was shipped from the warehouse to me in this damaged condition. There must have been a lot of power behind whatever put this crack and hole in the plastic. I never even unpacked the inside of the machine. GF has offered to send a new machine. This is great, but by the time it gets here, I will lost 2 months of the warranty. This is what GF and I are disagreeing on. I purchased a very expensive machine with a 12 month warranty, and that is what I expect to get. If the machine was damaged prior to shipment, then GF needs to work out that issue with the manufacturer. I should not be taking the loss of 2 months warranty because a damaged unit was shipped. I worked for many years in the manufacturing business as a cost accountant. This is not how the warranty is to be used.
I would appreciate no more unfavorable comments to me. A couple of you are trying to slander me. Please stop. That is not how the community should work.
There are more than a few of us well familiar with your story @cher8754. And for what it’s worth, I agree with you entirely. If you received a machine that was damaged prior to being shipped… Then your warranty should not be shortened while you wait for one to arrive in one piece. HOWEVER… We also see you bouncing into other people’s support tickets (that is what this forum is for … Problems and Support… it opens a support ticket.) And you have gone from being a case where we sympathize to being a sour grape that has already decided to return for a refund and is now just spreading grief to anyone that will listen. And doing so in entirely the wrong place. Do not muddy up other people’s support tickets, PLEASE.
I wouldn’t call any of this rude. I would say that you aren’t that unique or hard to figure out here, many of us have had similar complaints about glowforge’s service model. In fact I have been very vocal about exactly the same things you are talking about.
We get it, you’re unhappy. It’s natural to feel like you’re being disrespected or attacked when you’re already so frustrated. The fact is though that you’re surrounded by people who get exactly where you’re coming from, and while it may not seem this way to you at the moment, we are your people.
It’s too bad that you’ve soured on the Glowforge experience; when it works and you’re all dialed in it is an amazingly rewarding machine. Maybe they’ll turn the ship around for you and you’ll get to see what we mean, but if not, good luck with your next laser.
Sorry, I I did not know I was not supposed to make comments about my situation in another commentor’s thread. I don’t know how I would have known that.
In any other area of the forum it would be fine. But here in Problems and Support, you’re barging in on another user’s support ticket and distracting from the issue they are attempting to get fixed. Support has to comb through this entire thread to try to separate out what’s relevant to the support request, so posting endless paragraphs about your own problems, for which you already have your own support ticket, just makes it take that much longer for the person whose ticket it is to get the help THEY need.
