Anime Limited Releases Statement On Christmas Order Delays

If you were one of the many customers who took part in Anime Limited’s 12 Days of Christmas series of anime sales, you may be wondering why on the cusp of Christmas, you are still waiting for your order. Having first made users of our forum and Discord server aware on 10th December 2018 of unfortunate issues at distribution centre, who had been contracted specifically to handle the higher-than-usual demand the annual sales bring, Anime Limited have today emailed a statement to everyone who has placed an order during the campaign. While the statement mentions actions they are taking to resolve these delays, Anime Limited do caution that orders may still not arrive in time for Christmas.

Good evening.

I hope all is well.

You’re receiving this message as you placed an order during our recent AllTheAnime.com 12 Days of Christmas sales. This is email is to provide an general overview update on where things stand with orders currently, though we appreciate many of you reading may have received your orders.

First of all before going any further on behalf of everyone at All The Anime / Anime Ltd. we want to profusely apologise for the delay in receiving what you ordered.

We want to make sure we give context for what has happened, what we’ve done (and continuing to do) to try and rectify this, and what the current standing of things are.

This is going to be a long message, but we want to make sure we as clear and transparent as we can be on the situation.

What’s happened –
To give full context (and in case you’re not aware), we contracted a distribution centre – different to who normally fulfils orders for us, so as to cope with demand – to handle the fulfilment of all orders during this busy period in a timely manner.

Although thousands of orders have been fulfilled, the distribution centre finally made us aware earlier this week that there will still many orders unfulfilled despite claiming that software issues that had caused delays in shipping initially were fixed, that all was in hand and ultimately not alerting us to the situation despite us raising many concerns about the status of fulfilment for well over a week prior to that.

Needless to say we’re incredibly frustrated and unhappy with the poor service of the distribution centre at this critical period, and we’re even more unhappy that this poor service has been passed on to our customers.

Though in the grand scheme of things we are a small company, the quality of service we provide is something we take pride in. It’s something we have built for our AllTheAnime.com online store over the years and it’s not at all fair that your experience ordering from us has been impacted in this way.

Since then for the past 48 hours we’ve been working with the distribution centre to ensure that any outstanding issues are resolved, and to try and get visibility on where things currently stand so we can accurately update all our customers being impacted by this. We have finally been granted the information we’ve been requesting, hence why you’re receiving this message now.

Where do things currently stand:
Now that we have this information we’ve been requesting, as we mentioned earlier thousands of orders have been fulfilled.

At time of writing around 1000 orders have already been shipped to customers, while there are over 2400 orders currently being prepared for shipping, with the plan being (all going well) for the majority if not all of those to be dispatched tonight (Friday 21st December) via the TNT courier service.

Whether these orders will be able to arrive in time for Christmas at this late stage is something we simply cannot answer I’m afraid – although a significant portion of these orders should arrive with customers on Monday, obviously this being Christmas Eve means we can’t make any guarantees of these orders arriving in time for Christmas itself.

Beyond this batch of orders, we have been told the remaining orders will be picked and packed for shipping over the coming days with the goal being to have all of those being dispatched across the 27th and 28th of December when courier services resume after Christmas.

Though we’ve been assured that all of the remaining orders are going to be shipped as fast as humanly possible, I’m sure you can understand given what we’ve said above why we’re not taking that completely at face value.

How do I find out the status of my order(s)?
We know a lot of you have contacted us since midnight this morning (Friday 21st December) asking for an update. We are responding to all of these queries as fast as possible as we’re sending this and will continue to do throughout tonight and tomorrow as needed.

If you would like to get the latest update on your order(s), please respond to this email providing us the order numbers in question and we’ll update you as soon possible.

Can I cancel my order?
Yes. We understand that what you ordered may have been intended to be a gift for Christmas, or simply put it won’t arrive in time for you. We’re more than happy to accommodate any cancellation requests.

To do this please respond to this email with the order number(s) in question and we can do that for you.

I will add it’s entirely possible that due to the processes of the distribution centre your order my still get shipped, but we can discuss returns and such separately should that occur.

A final word:
Once again on behalf of everyone at All The Anime / Anime Ltd., we offer our deepest and sincerest apologies for this.

Despite our planning of utilising a distribution centre that’s meant be well equipped in dealing with the demand of orders we received over the sale period at our site, we have been let down tremendously by their service.

We know this doesn’t change the fact this has impacted you, but please know we have been and are continuing to do everything in our power to get this rectified as timely as possible.

We’re truly grateful for your custom, support and understanding at this time, and please rest assured that we share your frustrations and will be doing our utmost to ensure that this kind of situation is never repeated, even during a busy period such as this one.

Kind regards,

Jeremy Graves
Marketing Executive, All The Anime / Anime Ltd.

According to the website of courier service TNT, the last listed day of dispatch to ensure delivery on Christmas Eve is today – Friday 21st December. A few readers have already noted that they have received items from the first 3 days of sale, although the Day 1 pre-order for the Snow White and the Red Hair Complete Collection, initially listed with an estimated dispatch of the week commencing Monday 17th December, has currently yet to be reported as received by our readers.

Some customers (including our writers) received processing notifications for Day 4 purchases as far back as 6th December 2018, which Anime Limited Marketing Manager Andy Hanley noted at the time, that it may not be indicative of a dispatch:

There have been some delays to shipping of 12 Days orders due to software issues at the distribution warehouse. That’s been sorted as of today, so the orders will be flowing like wine this week (hopefully!)

Usually, orders made to Anime Limited’s online store have been fulfilled by Anime-On-Line, which is operated by distributor MVM Entertainment. They were also responsible for the fulfilment of last year’s 12 Days of Christmas sales campaign, with Tony from MVM commenting on the forums that “[…last year’s sales nearly killed me]” – hopefully an exaggeration!

Did you buy anything in Anime Limited’s 12 Days of Christmas, and how has this delay affected you? Were they intended for yourself, or Christmas presents for someone else? Let us know!