Hello everyone! There’s definitely excitement in the air amongst our community located in the UK, France, and Germany this week as we’ve started shipping Batch 8 orders. Thank you so much for your patience while we worked hard behind to the scenes to get everything prepared for final processing and shipment. The amount of effort to get this over the finish line was nothing short of herculean for our small team here at Framework, but we’re constantly learning, evolving, and now scaling to meet the needs of growing global demand for Framework Laptops. We appreciate your amazing support!
As part of the learning process, when entering our new geographic locations, we identified some payment flows that did not previously affect our US or Canadian customers. This was mainly related to payment method security on many credit cards in the EU/UK called “3D Secure”. 3D Secure redirects online payments to the cardholder’s banking institution for authorization to finalize payments, which is great, but the integration with our payment processor is unfortunately not able to handle all failures in this flow in an elegant way quite yet for some individuals. Most of our final payment captures have gone smoothly for our UK, German, and French customers, but others are blocked by the 3D Secure flow. If you receive a “Action Required” email after a final payment capture failure, don’t panic. There’s a link in that email which says “Complete Payment” and this will complete the 3D Secure authentication and move your order through final processing. You won’t lose your place in line and we will work to ship your order out as soon as we can after verification of final payment capture. If you still run into problems, please contact Framework Support via the support web form located here: Framework | Support. There might be another reason why the payment was not processed which we can investigate. The most common being insufficient funds or security blocks by your banking institution.
On the “insufficient funds” payment failure, we know we take some of the blame there on this first batch of orders, and we apologize. A Framework Laptop purchase is not an insignificant amount of money, and we know some orders did not receive the second notification email prior to us attempting to capture final payment to provide time to make sure funds were available for that capture. As it is currently Friday, February 18th, and we’re shipping directly from Taiwan to our customers in the UK, France, and Germany, we only have a few more shipping days left to meet our February shipping estimate for Batch 8 customers. We’re feverishly working with our partners to get these orders out the door and into your hands which requires us to get through processing as quickly as possible. While many received the final notification of imminently capturing final payment, we know some did not due to the compressed timing. That said, again, do not panic. If you get a payment failure “Action Required” email, simply prepare the funding, and then click on the “Complete Payment” link in that email. It will process the order it will be prepared for shipment. We only ask that you complete that flow as soon as you can as to not delay your order shipment.
Finally, we’re seeing an uptick in contacts to Framework Support with display damage, which we’ve root caused for many customers as putting heavy objects (books, etc.) on the top lid, either on a table, or in their backpack without proper padding between the top lid and the objects. There is some flex in the lid due to the thinness of the Framework Laptop and pressure from the corner of an object can flex internal components and cause damage, so we kindly ask that customers be aware of what objects are in contact with the laptop. The bottom cover has less flex and is more resilient, but the above applies to the laptop as a whole. This all said, it’s entirely possible that something else has gone wrong, and you should definitely contact Framework Support so that we can troubleshoot with you. Sometimes, it’s a super easy fix that doesn’t require hardware replacement.
For us here at Framework, it’s been a constant sprint, but it has been extremely satisfying for all of us as we’re feeding on the community’s constant energy. We share in your excitement and look forward to our new friends across the pond receiving their Framework Laptops! For those in countries that have not yet been included in official support, know that we’ve never stopped working to expand our footprint and are working with relevant entities, government agencies, etc. to queue up new launch locations. It’s a process which is not simply tied to localization as there are specific requirements that need to be met for each country. 2022 is going to be a monster year for us, and we thank you for your continued patience.
From all of us here at Framework, thank you, merci de tout coeur, danke sehr!
Like, yeah, until quite recently even Amazon couldn’t get this working right, even though Swedish online merchants have of course been dealing just fine with this since the mid 00’s… (Though now living in NL and using the iDeal payment option, I’m hoping it’s no issue for my purchase here.)