Amazon is the back-end fulfillment provider for our TikTok Shop. We sent in additional inventory to Amazon as soon as we saw the uptick in sales on the very first day of the promo period and have continued to send in more but Amazon had a hard time catching up on the processing when they were already overloaded by Black Friday shipments, which is 10X of their regular volume.
The multiple snowstorms in the Midwest in the last few weeks further exacerbated the delays when many of the trucking routes nationwide were shut down.
To make things worse, some technical errors happened between TikTok Shop and Amazon’s system, which resulted in many orders being cancelled, so we had to manually track down every single one of these cancelled orders to “re-submit” to Amazon for them to be fulfilled.
We continue to send in more and more inventory (in the tens of thousands) to Amazon to ensure that we have inventory allocated to every single order already placed. We never oversold any of our inventory.
We turned on the “backorder” feature on TikTok on the afternoon of Nov 21st so customers who bought after that time would already see an extended shipping window.
We have also escalated to TikTok to get an extension for the shipment window so customer’s orders are not automatically cancelled by TikTok.
TikTok automatically cancelled your order when we cannot ship your order within a designated time period. If this happened to you, we have sent you a TikTok coupon via TikTok direct messages so you can re-buy Nex Playground at the promo price you paid for. If you haven’t received the coupon, please send us a direct message on TikTok.
Recommendation: we’re running very low on stock right now and our product listing on TikTok may go offline anytime so it’s recommended that you re-buy on TikTok ASAP. Your coupon is valid for 3 months so if you miss the re-buy window now you can buy it in January when there’s new inventory arriving.
This means your order is still being processed by Amazon. We found out that tracking number generated by Amazon is not automatically populated to TikTok Shop consistently, so our team has been manually adding those tracking numbers to your orders one by one.
You can wait for the tracking number to show up. If it does not, there is a possibility that TikTok will auto-cancel your order. If that happens, you will be eligible for the coupon per the above process.
If you prefer not to wait any longer, you can cancel your TikTok order. There are still some stock available in some retailers. Here is an inventory tracker we built by crawling all retailer websites. You can try go to the retailers if you must get it in hand before Xmas, but please note that the original TikTok promo pricing may not be available through these retailers.
Your order is shipped already and on its way. No action is needed on your part other than keeping an eye on the tracking number in TikTok.
We are seeing that Amazon has picked up the pace on the backlog and thousands of orders have been shipped in the last few days. While we can’t guarantee your order will arrive before Xmas, we are optimistic that Amazon’s logistics team will come through.
The way that Amazon handles the delivery is not exactly “first in first out”, it’s completely normal that some later orders are fulfilled first.
Unfortunately our hands are tied as the inventory was sent to Amazon many weeks ago and in their possession. We got a lot of emails and messages sent to our customer support team and we apologize that you’ve been getting the same answer over and over again. We’re very sorry.
Thank you again for choosing Nex Playground and giving us a chance to serve your families.
Yours sincerely,
Belle L.
VP, Customer Experience
Cover image credit: Photo by Donna Elliot on Unsplash
