Speed Industry - be aware you probably won't get reward points

[Kmj442]

I haven't had an issue receiving my products but if you are spending $1000s expecting some reward points to be used for future purchases, don't count on it.

I've ordered over $2500 worth of stuff and have no received a single reward point for any of my purchases, and my last order was october...so its not like they needed a week or 2 after shipping. I've contacted them about it twice and both times they just stop responding and just tried again but I figure its a lost cause and will certainly not be counting on anything in the future.

Just a heads up since that was one of the redeeming points of speed industry since their prices seemed fair but they also had this "reward" program.

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[rotary heart]

I haven't had an issue receiving my products but if you are spending $1000s expecting some reward points to be used for future purchases, don't count on it.

I've ordered over $2500 worth of stuff and have no received a single reward point for any of my purchases, and my last order was october...so its not like they needed a week or 2 after shipping. I've contacted them about it twice and both times they just stop responding and just tried again but I figure its a lost cause and will certainly not be counting on anything in the future.

Just a heads up since that was one of the redeeming points of speed industry since their prices seemed fair but they also had this "reward" program.

I have experienced the exact same thing. Products arrive without problems and they have good prices, but the points are never added.

 

[_Sp1ral0ut]

Not to question anyone's intelligence, but did you create an account and made sure to sign in when purchasing? I know at the top it always says "my account" even when I'm not signed in. I do not use the stay signed in option and always have to login; it's why I noticed this. Just asking.

 

[MR_X]

Funny you posted this today. I just placed an order with them and I noticed that it gave me the option to use the award points.

 

[travsam89]

Seems like its hit or miss on the points. I have some big ticket items ordered as well with no points accumulated. ?‍

 

[Vegas Supra]

The orders need to be marked 100% completed and shipped to have the rewards go into accounts. There is an issue with one of our API not always writing back to the store... So if the order is still pending its not complete - If you earned the points or have questions they are your points. Email in and they will get you the points owed to you.

 

[Kmj442]

Not to question anyone's intelligence, but did you create an account and made sure to sign in when purchasing? I know at the top it always says "my account" even when I'm not signed in. I do not use the stay signed in option and always have to login; it's why I noticed this. Just asking.

Not a bad question but when I log in I see my purchases as previous orders listed to my account.

 

[Kmj442]

The orders need to be marked 100% completed and shipped to have the rewards go into accounts. There is an issue with one of our API not always writing back to the store... So if the order is still pending its not complete - If you earned the points or have questions they are your points. Email in and they will get you the points owed to you.

Well then this needs to be fixed since I have had both my orders for MONTHS and they are still in processing. Seems like a fairly big hole in the API and a terrible design (as a SW dev this is useless).

 

[YOTA_IL]

I know I was told by them if you order over the phone IE they give you a different price and send you an email invoice, you don’t receive points. You only receive the points by website orders.

 

[rotary heart]

The orders need to be marked 100% completed and shipped to have the rewards go into accounts. There is an issue with one of our API not always writing back to the store... So if the order is still pending its not complete - If you earned the points or have questions they are your points. Email in and they will get you the points owed to you.

Well, same as OP, I've sent emails for more than a month asking about the points since they said that they will add it manually. I'm still waiting for a response back....

 

[Deighvid]

Cringe, more (unsurprising) issues with Speed Industry ?

Hopefully it gets sorted

 

[Kmj442]

I got my points yesterday - thank you @Vegas Supra. Just to as a note for all other questions/comments coming in, I did order online, through their store. The issue I believe was, as stated above, the API endpoint not being updated that the order was 100% complete as they were still in pending status when I checked. I have no clue why this is an issue as that seems like a terrible oversight by the developers, whether it be their own local endpoint or a service they use that it just sits in processing (Mine are STILL processing but they manually gave me my points).

 

[zrk]

I have no clue why this is an issue as that seems like a terrible oversight by the developers

As as software engineer of couple years now, I can think of a few reasons why this might not be a "terrible oversight". Here's one general bucket of them.

The business wants to wait to issue points until delivery to issue points, The business wants to wait for <time period T> to avoid issuing points for returns, The business wants to wait for <time period T> to avoid issuing points for chargebacks

This requires package tracking, which involves a third party. All major carriers charge money for API requests to track packages once a certain volume is reach. To combat things getting annoyling expensive to issue points, requests are issued to the carries on a regular cadence until expected delivery date is reached to determine if a package was delivered.

Once expected delivery date is reached, if the package has not yet been marked as delivered in the system we need to talk about scheduling jobs for some <number N> of total outstanding packages on some exponentially backing-off time series (1 day later, 2 days later, 4 days later, 16 days later, etc). There a lot of subtlety in scaling this jobs especially at scale. Since you're not talking about just 1 package, you're talking about some <number N> of outstanding packages, you also have to deal with API rate limiting.

Also, since you're talking about a third party's API, and not your own you have to handle the case for general network instability where some request doesn't actually make it through to the carrier's API. So in the case of some <package P> not successfully getting a response from <api A> on <time-series day 16> you either need to handle the case of a priority requeue of the job and push it to the top, or wait until the next exponentially decayed back-off (in this case is 32 days).

Though, If particular carrier was hosted on AWS's us-east-1 region last week for example, no requests for package tracking succeeded in a 24 hour time period, which means we now have to deal with <missed tracking requests R>/<carriers request-limit RL>, further complicating things. In a centralized system you're tailing about <num reqeusts> * <avg response time from third party> in clock time. Of course we can solve for that on our end for that with a distributed system/distributed job queue, but you're still fighting rate limits, or spending a ton of money to give away free points.

Toss this general problem on a PMs desk, they see <some small pct> of customers are seeing issues with getting points issued (which costs the business money) when package tracking fails and it falls pretty low on the priority scale since it doesn't directly affect Q1 OKRs or impact revenue. Combine that with it living next to some sketchy old technical debt and marketing's objectives of hitting +4% on revenue, and resources are allocated elsewhere.

This all even assumes that you can trust carries to accurately mark packages as delivered.. Which.. isn't always the case.

This is just one possible piece of things, but what do I know?

 

[Kmj442]

As as software engineer of couple years now, I can think of a few reasons why this might not be a "terrible oversight". Here's one general bucket of them.
...
This is just one possible piece of things, but what do I know?

As I mentioned before, I've been doing SW dev for a bit but most of those situations could be properly handled with a good bit of error checking and no need for additional tracking calls.

If for example you use your exponential backoff for checking package status, once it gets passed the <n-th> iteration, have it flagged for manual follow-up?

An api request fails, thats a very basic 200 check...should never be an issue, even if it doesn't return a normal error code, if you are checking for 200, that would only return if you have a successful request.

Even so, once you pass the return date of an item - points should be rewarded regardless as now you successfully completed a transaction that is "final." Sure there may be outliers to this scenario but for 99.9% of the time this should work.

All this being said, I am not in webdev, I do embedded and test development for different platforms, worked different telecom systems in the past.

 

[zrk]

have it flagged for manual follow-up

PMs response: "and now you have a CSR manually looking at 4,000 tickets a day generated by some system, and you need another system to generate the ticket."

I consider myself to be.. i don't know, not new to the field, but not a gray beard either. Just hit 20 years, all of it in high-veoocity e-commerce or e-commerce related fields (3 years Venmo/PayPal, 8 years SeatGeek, 2 years Peek.com, some other bullshit in there too).

Shit gets tricky, especially on low priority tickets that cost the company money rather than generate revenue.

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