Best wishes 2021, FAQ, and updates

First of all, we would like to thank those who used our service and who trusted us. The year 2020 has been a very special and very difficult year for many people. The pandemic that has affected the planet has had an immeasurable impact on our habits, on our morale, on our jobs, and on many services. Despite this situation, we hope that you were able to spend a heartwarming holiday season with those you love.

We have received a very large number of emails and we know that some users are still waiting for their Boxes or a reply from us and we have therefore decided to give a global response in the form of FAQs before we can respond to everyone individually.
As you may have noticed too, we are not very actives on our social networks recently, and we would like to explain us on this point as well.

First, we would like to tell you a little more about our service and our profile.
We realize that you, as a customer, have a certain expectation and a certain degree of requirements when using a paid service.
You are used, thanks to great companies like Amazon, to be delivered and to have replies very quickly.
But unfortunately, we are very far from having all these means and manpower.
Tanoshi Me Box is for the moment only a small family business and only a side business (we have another main job beside), which we try to make survive and grow in our free time, despite this crisis that impacted everyone in 2020.

All of the orders are being well processed and the boxes are all shipped, but we are counting on your understanding regarding any delays in processing orders.
We are currently very few to take care of it, and this company does not yet have the level to offer you a service that can meet all your expectations as quickly as possible.
We do not have a staff that deals exclusively with customer service or to take care of our social networks.
Our goal is to be able to pass a milestone that will allow us to become a real company and to be able to recruit a team to provide the service we want to offer you.

In December we had to deal for the first time with a relatively large number of orders which was followed by numerous emails and messages from our customers.
We try to respond to everyone, but our priority is to prepare and ship orders as quickly as possible so we ask you to be patient with our responses.
Answering all e-mails is a huge and continuous job, and in the near future, we hope to have a dedicated customer service department to meet your expectations.
We are sincerely sorry if you have felt offended, scammed, or disappointed after using our service, but we will do our best to improve our communication and the speed of processing orders.

Before we can respond to all the remaining emails we created this FAQ to try to answer the most frequent questions and complaints that we have received.

1. When do you send my first Box?

A little reminder on how our subscription service works.
When you sign up it’s for the following month’s Box, not the current one.
Whether you register on the 1st of the month or on the 31st, your Box will still be that of the following month.
So if you sign up at the beginning of the month, it is likely that it will seem very long to you and you will receive your first Box after more than a month.
We start preparing them at the end of the registration deadline at the end of the month, and it usually takes us 10 to 15 days to prepare and send them.
Depending on the number of orders, this may sometimes take us longer than expected, but don’t worry, all your Boxes will be sent.
Regarding the January Box, they are currently being shipped.
If you are in a hurry and you want a Box more fastly for a gift or an upcoming event, instead, we recommend that you use our My Box service where you choose the content of your Box yourself. In this service, the orders are dispatched as soon as they can be prepared (a few days).

2. Where is my Box? Where is the tracking number? Why is it taking so long?

To send the Boxes we currently use the service from the Japanese Post, “Priority Air Mail”.
This service is supposed to take between a week and ten days to deliver packages (during normal conditions).
It appears that many of our users are not fully aware of the true impacts of the pandemic on postal services and deliveries.
Flights between countries have been reduced significantly and therefore delays are considerably extended for shipments.
It is still currently not possible to send air parcels from Japan to some countries and this remains a very limited service overall.
Add to that the fact that at this time of year the postal services are overworked all the time, and it then becomes easier to understand that it can take much longer than normal to receive your parcels from there. ‘foreign.
We receive a large number of rather virulent e-mails and bad reviews from dissatisfied customers who ask us for their Boxes and complain about the delays.
We are deeply sorry about this situation, but we have no control over the deliveries and on our side, we are doing our part by sending you your Boxes.
What happens next with the packages is unfortunately beyond our control, and being threatening or derogatory to us is not going to make your package arrive any faster.
We understand your frustration and expectations, but please understand that we are not responsible for this situation.
The only way to know where the Boxes are is to get a tracking number, but unfortunately, the tracking and register service is normally a paying option from the Japanese Post that is actually suspended for the US, Canada, and Australia at the moment. Due to the pandemic, the very first reaction from the Post was to suspend many services, including the possibility to send any package to some countries. It restarts slowly and since last October we can ship again in most countries, but the service is still limited. And the tracking and registering option is not provided by the Japanese Post yet.
So we are very sorry but we can’t give you any tracking number and it is impossible for us to tell you exactly where is your box or which day it will exactly arrive.
We normally make this option available only to the subscriptions from our website, but at the moment we can’t, unfortunately, provide this option for our users from the US, Canada, or Australia.
If you selected the tracking number option or the EMS service, we will refund you the amount you paid for this option in case it can’t be used in your country. We plan to make this option included for free when the situation is getting back to normal, we hope in a near future.
During this period it sometimes happens that the Boxes take more than a month to arrive. Each post office manages their parcel deliveries with a priority and in a way on where we, once again, have no control.
It even happens that some subscribers receive their Box of the following month before the one they are still expected.
But in almost all cases, Boxes all end up arriving sooner or later. It can happen that packages are lost or stolen, but this still happens very rarely and you can generally consider your package as probably lost after a period of 3 months. Until this period there are still possibilities for your package to be delivered to you.
We have noticed the same problems by following the Twitter accounts of well-known competitor Japanese Box services. Some of their subscribers sometimes even report having received their Box more than 2 months late. So don’t give up hope, your Box can still arrive, even after such long periods.

A big thank you to those who contact us to inform us that they have received their Boxes or who share their Box photos on social networks.
It gives us great pleasure to know when you received your Boxes.

3. I send an email but had no reply. What kind of Customer service is that?

We are very sorry if we couldn’t reply to your email or message yet but we honestly were overcharged with orders this month and we don’t have the level yet to have a dedicated Customer service that can reply quickly to all the emails. Our priority was to prepare all the boxes and to ship everything as soon as possible. So we couldn’t take the time to reply individually to all the emails one by one yet. We are terribly sorry if you felt offended or if you were worried about our lack of communication. It represents a huge work to reply to the emails and until we have dedicated customer service it may take time for us before to reply to your emails. We are sorry about that and we will do our best to be able to reply to your expectation properly in a near future.
Realizing that few of you read our Terms of Service or FAQs, we intend to use an automated help desktop system in the near future to help you get your questions answered faster.
Of course, if we manage to make Tanoshi Me a real business then we will have employees assigned to this task and we will then be able to respond to you quickly.
Before contacting us, however, we invite you to carefully consult our FAQ:
https://box.tanoshi-me.com/faq/

4. You charged me twice before I could receive any box.

On most subscription services the renewal date is settled. Even if you subscribe on the very first day of the month or the last day, the next withdrawal will be on a decided date (15th of each month). Considering the time of preparation and shipping, it can, unfortunately, happen to be renewed and charged twice even before that you received your first Box. If you subscribe for example the 29th of the Month, your renewal and the second payment will arrive quickly on the 15th of the following Month on Cratejoy but we ship around the 10th so it makes it almost sure that it will happen that way. We understand that you expect at least to receive and to try one Box before to be renewed, but this is something that can happen, especially during that time of big delays in the deliveries. Our advice is to pause your subscription or to move your next renewal to the next month if you don’t want this to happen. We kindly remind you that we are not controlling things on Cratejoy.
You can cancel or postponed the next renewal by yourself from your control panel.

5. My Box has not arrived yet, I want a refund! What happens if my Box never arrived?

Although there may be significant delays, Boxes all come in and do not vanish without a trace.
When it comes to food products, Boxes are rarely stolen, and the losses are very rare.
In the worst case (wrong address, unclaimed Box, etc.), the boxes are returned to us in Japan and we will contact you immediately to try to find the reason for non-delivery. If this is due to an error on our part, we will take care of the reshipment or the full refund of your order.
If this comes from a customer error, we will ask you to cover the costs of reshipping the Box.
It is useless to contact us to ask us where your Box is located because we cannot answer this question.
And if you have your tracking number, then you can normally tell where it is by yourself.

We’re sorry if you find yourself in this situation, but we do not refund Boxes that have already been shipped.
Even if your Box is late, there is always a chance that it will arrive, even after several months.
If after more than 3 months after shipment you still not having received your Box, it may be considered lost and we can possibly make a goodwill gesture, but we cannot under any circumstances refund a Box that is being late or which has been lost by the postal service.
However, we can of course refund any order that has not been shipped yet.
Thank you for your understanding.

That’s it for this FAQ, we hope this answers some of your questions and we will still answer you individually as soon as possible.

2021 objectives

Our goal for 2021 is to expand our service and grow Tanoshi Me from a side business to a truly viable business with paid employees. Strong competition and our small means make it difficult to manage and expand our company, and 2021 will be a decisive year for us.
We still have plenty of ideas and projects, but if we don’t manage to increase our subscribers significantly, this year may mark the end of our service.
If on the contrary, despite the situation, we manage to achieve our goal of subscribers, it will have wonderful consequences for our service and its users:

–Cheaper Boxes
The more orders there are, the more the costs decrease on our side. This will allow us to become more competitive and offer you even more attractive prices and content.

–Tracking number included
It will also depend on the evolution of this pandemic and the postal services but if we manage to get a certain number of subscribers, the tracking numbers can be included for free in the price of the Boxes.

–A larger choice of products
Adding products to our catalog also takes a lot of time and if our team grows it also means that we may have more time to add many more products.

–Best communication
One of our goals is to be able to make our social networks more attractive and to be able to communicate better with our community.

–Rapidity in order processing
With a larger team, we will be able to process all orders much faster and you will receive your Boxes faster.

–New services.
We have several other projects in progress that cannot move forward for the moment due to lack of time, but we should open an online store full of Japanese products (food, goodies, figurines …)

–Many more contests, games, and gifts for our users
One of the important points that we have unfortunately had to put aside lately is to offer our community as much fun as possible with contests, games, and the possibility of receiving lots of gifts from Japan. We sincerely hope to be able to develop this point and resume competitions and giveaways.

–Lots of partnerships
We have also slowed down our partnerships because of delivery problems. We hope to be able to work with YouTubers and people who believe in our project to help us promote our service. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested.

We really want you to discover lots of products and bring you the maximum fun with our Boxes.
Our long-term goal is to become the best Box service on the market and offer you the best content and value for money and this year will be decisive for the realization of this project.

A big thank you to our partners and our loyal users who love our service and believe in us.
We also thank from the bottom of our hearts all our customers who have shown great patience and understanding despite the delays and problems with deliveries.
And a big thank you and big thumbs up to you if you had the courage to read all of these lines to the end.

Finally, we would like to apologize again for our lack of communication, but we still hope that you enjoy your Boxes and the products we offer you.
This message comes a bit late and was intended to arrive right after the New Year. But we still wanted to offer you our best wishes for this year 2021.

The Tanoshi Me team