While I knew in September I still trusted promised delivery. For somebody like @Openit4us who comes to a page, see’s buy now (nothing like “back it” …) it is not clear. Especially when delivery in January is promised. This exactly the dishonest communication I am talking about. There is no banner saying "You are pre-ordering now in December, it could be later than January.
At the moment there is “Fairphone 2 now shipping!” over the “Order now!” button and clicking on it it says “New orders shipping in february” which hopefully will be true. Probably the could say february to march, but other than that I see nothing wrong with it.
While I agree that for example the blog could give more insight, I would not know why they should put something on their main page saying “Well, we started delivering and we cannot be totally sure that you will get your phone very soon but we will definetly try!”.
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Since september I’m paying full monthly smart phone rates to my provider while using my old Nokia awaiting my FP2 to arrive. It still hase’t. This is why some want their long-awaited FP2 to arrive as soon as possible.
I might be a bit late, but so far nothing has changed in the communication of Fairphone and so I wanted to reanimate this discussion.
I relied on the counter and when it hit 10,000 phones, I was certain that my phone was shipped and that I would get my phone tomorrow at the latest. But then I had to realize that the counter does not correspond with the delivery number and now I have no indication whatsoever about when to expect my phone as I stopped to trust in their own predictions a long time ago. I know, Fairphone never explicitly claimed that the counter and the delivery number would correspond. But based on several post, it was clear that many people assumed it. So right now I am really disappointed that they still led everybody believe it.
[quote=“Sonne,
post:11, topic:12357”]
I wouldn’t choose the word “dishonest” but I also feel that the official statements often read as polished for PR and not so much intended to give open and honest informative updates about what’s going on. Also the way the delays are described feels often … I wouldn’t say dishonest, but like someont trying to weasel out of something bad they have done.
[/quote]
I completely agree with Sonne. Even though they are posting up-dates three times a week, most of the time they are not actually giving information. Instead they are throwing numbers around that only confuse people. Like how many phones they have in stock at the distributions center, a number that doesn’t say anything about how fast this phones are actually shipped to their owners.
In the mail we got 12 days ago, they claimed to ship all phones until the end of January. Everybody could see (doing simple math) that they will not be able to fulfil that prediction if they only ship 600 phones per day. Why did they make such a prediction anyway? What’s more, if one adds all the phones that they expect to be shipped from China to the distribution centre in the next days, they won’t even have enough phones at the distribution centre to serve all pre-orders. So again, why would they make such an unrealistic prediction?
And even if they actually thought they could do it. Now that they realized they wouldn’t keep promise, they don’t seem to stand up for it. On yesterdays blog it says:
We are working on a new delivery outlook to communicate to owners via email which will estimate the last day in February when all pre-ordered phones will be shipped. Thanks for your patience, we’re getting there!
This is exactly what frustrates me. Instead of just saying “we are sorry, against expectations we are not able to ship all phones by the end of this week.”, they create such a strange sentence, that only in the subclause contains the actual information and that sounds as if nothing else had been claimed before.
I don’t mind the delays; I completely understand that things can go different than expected. I just don’t understand why they aren’t more transparent about it. I understand if you use some PR phrases to sell your product. But we already bought the phone and I think we have earned a fairer treatment.
Anyway I have big hopes for the promised mail and I really hope it will be a bit more informative than the last one.
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I totally agree with that. I just hope that this is a matter of the most likely very tense situation at the moment and the chaos, and not their kind of politics now. In other words: I hope it get’s better when they delivered all the phones ordered so far.
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I’d really have appreciated a fair information, and not meaningless counters. If I rely on my order number, my phone should be shipped sometime this week, but I’m trying to get used to the fact that this is not what will happen…
I’m still with you on the goals, but very disappointed by the communication.
By now, I’d guess you should be able to build a realistic planning of deliveries!
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For sure it is not a sorry.
But i think, the delivery problem is also a routine problem. FP is a young company, so they may need time to grow up in their business.
Ther aren’t Apple, Samsung or LG, so they just don’t have the experiance jet, so we may need to give them a chance.
If we had to wait much longer, we may could ask for a 10% reduction for the 2nd akku.
Asking doesn’t kill someone - mostly 
Ben
Ps. Best asking the Support by mail, what happen with your Order.
It sucks that the counter doesn’t correspond to the delivery number… you’re waiting in front of the counter for your number to come and nothing happens… 
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It might be helpful to know how many orders were placed (in the crowdfunding phase) because maybe the shipping counter is accurate but the delivery is taking a while too? The only reason I suggest this is because surely after weeks and weeks of people clearly assuming their order number corresponds with the delivery counter, someone would have corrected us by now? And also because the fact that the phones say “one of the first 17,418” (or whatever that number was, I can’t remember off the top of my head) must mean 17,418 phones were ordered, surely?.. if in reality that is order numbers (i.e. with potentially more than one phone in them) then it sounds like they’re not even planning to manufacture enough by the end of the month, let alone ship them.
Actually, I’m just confused now. It’s just occurred to me that I’ve been assuming my order number is around the 17000 mark because when I ordered mine (and payment cleared on 30th Sept, just within the crowdfunding period) that’s the number that was on the counter… however I did not receive an order number (like many people have discussed, it isn’t on ANY of my emails, and I checked junk) so for all I know it could be order number 13###, but the 17000th phone… in other words, I understand what you mean! It would still be helpful to know how many orders there were though, maybe we should try asking
You’re right and I understand when they have unexpected delivery issues. I am sure, they are really busy at the moment, trying to do their best to deliver the phones as fast as possible.
What makes me feel a bit fooled is that they don’t seem to communicate their problems in a completely honest way. Which I can somehow understand, cause it’s not really good propaganda, but at the same time many are desperately waiting for their phone to arrive and I think it Fairphone should inform these people better. At least in the mails they send only to their customers, they could be a bit more transparent.
However, as Sonne said, let’s hope they’ll change their information strategy, once they had time to reflect about how things went.
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I would have hoped so. And I really hope that there is another explanation, cause as you said, someone should have corrected us otherwise. But at the moment it seems to be the only reasonable explanation, why people having a deliver number around 10,000 haven’t gotten a tracking number yet.
It would defenitely be helpful to know how many orders there were. But I am not sure where we could ask, as the customer support is probably pretty busy at the moment. Maybe we should wait for @anon90052001’s blog update today evening. They probably have realized themselves that there is a big uncertainty about how to interpret the counter.
It’s strange that you did not receive a delivery number. Many people reported it on the forum and to be honest, I haven’t been followin it. But I think it turned out that only people who paid after the crowdfunding period did not receive a delivery number. So maybe although your payment was cleared within the crowdfunding period, it was processed by Fairphone only afterwards?
After ordering the phone I got a mail Fairphone: New order Nr. 3000XXXXX and after I paid, I got a second mail Fairphone: Bill Nr. 3000XXXXX for order Nr. 3000XXXXX, which containe the deliverynumber. There was also a bill attached to that second mail, but it did not contain the delivery number.
Hm I wouldn’t be sure that the fact that people got this wrong, has been clear for weeks, because it hadn’t been clearly discussed before just a few days ago. As you see, people here needed quite some time to recognize this and I can imagine the same delay on the other side of the story. Moreover, the FP team might not even by now have recognized that people are struggling with this, as it has only been discussed here in the forum, and they have a lot of other things to do than reading the forum. Therefore, I agree that it’s good to ask @anon90052001 about it.
I also considered this possibility (concerning bad pubilicity) and I fully agree with your comment here. I’d also have really liked to see an honest statement instead of frequently communicating the time delay only between the lines.
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The counter on the FP website seems to be the number of FP2 actually shipped. There was a discussion going on recently here in the Forum.
First, I also thought that the counter is corresponding with the delivery numbers but it is obviously not (same as you guys, my delivery number is 11xxx and I am still waiting… no delivery notification so far). An explanation might be: in case you ordered more than one phone at the same time (e.g. 2 or 3 or even more as a reseller) you still got only one delivery number. In this case, it makes sense that the counter is much more ahead of the delivery numbers. I only came to this conclusion just a couple of days ago.
Anyway, I agree with you that the information policy of FP could be better and I am somehow disappointed too. Actually, the counter is not really useful to know about when exactly our FP2s will be shipped as we don’t know how many FP2 had been ordered at the time of our orders/payment. I only remember that the counter of pre-ordered phones was at approx. 13,xxx when placing my order but this doesn’t really help either as I have no idea how many phones had been ordered till FP received my payment. So, the only thing we can do is wait… And wait a bit more. 
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Without wanting to rely on counters too much, using my Super Nerd Sense I did notice that when I bought my phone on 25 September, its delivery number 13,8XX co-incided with the crowdfunding counter that got to around 14,000 that day.
This seems to be tracked on the Fairphone facebook page, which says they got to the 15,000 on 28 September.
However, we’ve flagged @anon90052001 so much in this thread that he’s bound to give us all the answers today 
I’m very similar to you. There’s a screenshot of the number of phones sold on the 24th as 13,788; I ordered that day and got the delivery number 13,793. I guess there could have been a delay in updating the counter but they seem pretty similar. That’s also not counting orders which were cancelled (I even made an order and had to cancel it as I selected the wrong payment type).
Hi everybody,
I’m sorry that 1) delivery is taking longer than we originally planned, and 2) the communication about the delays and delivery dates has not been better. Production and delivery projections have been quite uncertain these last weeks, and we have tried our best to communicate the information we have - which you can tell was not much.
Now, I can say that the situation on the production line is looking better. The number of phones leaving China should be quite high the first week of February, so our distribution center will have plenty of phones to be shipping the next weeks.
In hindsight, the shipping counter may have done more harm than good, as it has never been a perfect indicator when you’d receive your phone. But lately it’s been even more off, and I apologize for the confusion that has caused.
We are putting the latest delivery timeline in a newsletter we plan to email to owners on Friday. Thanks for your patience. I can imagine this has been quite an intense and long experience waiting for your phone - thank you for staying with us through the highs and lows!
Joe
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