EBC and Zondervan 87 bundle
I heard today that customers who have purchased the larger Zondervan bundles will only receive the resources once everything is available. So we'll have to wait at least a month to get Expositors. 
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
So we'll have to wait at least a month to get Expositors.
Just think how much more you will appreciate it once you get it! [:D]
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I was told that you will get them when they are available. I did not get the whole bundle, but I got more than just the EBC and today I got my EBC and will likely get the others next month.
Dr. Kevin Purcell, Director of Missions
Brushy Mountain Baptist Association0 -
Kevin A. Purcell said:
I was told that you will get them when they are available. I did not get the whole bundle, but I got more than just the EBC and today I got my EBC and will likely get the others next month.
Strange. Has your card been charged, and if so was it charged for the whole amount of the bundle?
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark,
I'm not sure where you heard that, but my understanding is that Expositor's will ship/download on its own. It is listed as purchasable at: http://www.logos.com/products/details/5457
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Mark Barnes said:Kevin A. Purcell said:
I was told that you will get them when they are available. I did not get the whole bundle, but I got more than just the EBC and today I got my EBC and will likely get the others next month.
Strange. Has your card been charged, and if so was it charged for the whole amount of the bundle?
I ordered three Zondervan prepubs with the upgrade discount (EBC, NIDNTT, and NIDOTTE),and they were entered as three separate orders. Kevin probably has the same thing. But since your order is one, they can't charge you until they can deliver everything you ordered.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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Todd Phillips said:
But since your order is one, they can't charge you until they can deliver everything you ordered.
Yes, that's the explanation I've been given, which I understand. But it still would have been nice to receive the earlier material now, for example by part-charging the card, or even offering a 2-3 month payment plan.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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That's what's happening to me just now, I called CS and after 30 minutes being on hold (and I'm calling from Hong Kong), I was told that I have to wait until the whole bundle is ready before I could have the EBC.
Mark, I don't understand how you can remain so composed despite the arrangement. I think it is ridiculous and I'm totally unhappy about it!! I don't think that we should be penalized for our decision to purchase the whole bundle, after all it's not a small sum that we've committed to paying. But this is exactly how I'm feeling right now?! [:@][:'(]
Now why can't someone at Logos do something about it?????????
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you might think they could charge you the pre-pub price of EBC and deduct that from your total owed.
On the other hand perhaps each component is a tad cheaper in the Bundle (discount or no) than it is by itself. And they might not have 'hard figures" on what each one in the bundle costs..
I like Apples. Especially Honeycrisp.
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Sorry for my earlier comment. I missed the part about the "larger bundle"
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Amy Leung said:
That's what's happening to me just now, I called CS and after 30 minutes being on hold (and I'm calling from Hong Kong)… Mark, I don't understand how you can remain so composed despite the arrangement.
When I ring Logos they usually recognise my British accent and ask me if I'm calling from overseas. When I say "yes", the put me in a priority queue, so this time I was only on hold for a few minutes. And then the lady from CS was so nice to me, I couldn't even think of being mad!
But you're right - we shouldn't be penalised for our decision to purchase the whole bundle. But I think to be fair to Logos, this is the first time a situation like this has arisen, and it seems they don't have the systems in place to keep track of bundles of bundles. Perhaps they'll be better geared up next time around.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Maybe I don't have an accent (is that possible???) but every time I call I'm being hold for 30 minutes regardless of whether I tell them it's a long distance call or not. That is irritating but I can understand, at least they seem to be trying. But.
What happened tonight is unacceptable
What about Logos also being fair to the faithful users who believe in the company and continue to patronize them and honor our payments because of that. From what happened tonight, I don't think that they're trying to do anything at all. I don't care if I need to pay the whole sum up front but the trouble is that they don't seem to care either.
If they don't care about their customers and do business this way I'm going to call it a day with Logos. Have a nice day.
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From the conversation I had with Logos the problem was not that they don't care about us. They really do.
Our problem is not that we have to wait until April. If Logos had delayed the launch of all the Zondervan resources until April for the sake of those who bought the 87-volume bundle, no-one would be complaining (assuming those who just bought EBC didn't know it was finished!). Our problem is that other people who have paid less have EBC and those who have paid more don't. It's a question of fairness.
I've asked a Logos rep to post in this thread so we better understand why there's a problem. Let's hope they do.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Amy Leung said:
What happened tonight is unacceptable
What's the concern -- not delivering the commentary, or the wait time?
I'm not sure about the commentary story -- I'll check into that. The wait times are harder. I feel terrible about them, and we have new customer service reps in training, but we're literally at our growth capacity. (Renting more office space, scheduling a new phone trunk line, training new hires, etc.)
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Amy, I can understand the disappointment about no t being able to have the EBC the moment it is released. Perhaps I didn't have such high expectations, since my Pre-pub page has always given an anticipated date of 4/5/2010 for the Zondervan bundle. If we do end up getting the EBC early (which in my mind would require charging the entire bundle price, certainly not welcome by some people) that would be great, but in either case I think Logos has been fair.
I'm grateful that there are international users, and it is a reminder to me that not everyone, nor even a majority of users live in the same time zone as Logos, as I do. I don't know how much international calls are for you, but perhaps Skype is an option? I know it isn't perfect, but it is what I used when traveling throughout East Asia to call the States, and still use on occasion.
In the end, I'm sorry for your frustration and wish I could offer more encouragement.
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Amy, I too am very sorry for your frustration.
But, like Mark, I also understood that we would have to wait for the larger bundles.
Just today, they announced the "last call" for the NIV NT application set. IT will be awhile before some of these other materials are even ready.
So I'm not so sure that they can do this (unprecedented process) in any other way.
But I am sure that all good suggestions will be studied for the "next" time something like this comes up.
With sympathy,
Regards, SteveF
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Hi, I am not sure what, if anything, I can do to help with the order Amy, but if you email me I will try and help.Amy Leung said:What about Logos also being fair to the faithful users who believe in the company and continue to patronize them and honor our payments because of that. From what happened tonight, I don't think that they're trying to do anything at all. I don't care if I need to pay the whole sum up front but the trouble is that they don't seem to care either.
joe.miller []at] logos.com
Blessings
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Bob Pritchett said:
What's the concern -- not delivering the commentary, or the wait time?
The commentaries not coming, AND that no one is doing anything to rectify the situation.
Is it so difficult? Or am I making an unreasonable request?
Actually I'm not looking for "fairness", the world is not perfect thus not fair BUT I think people should at least try to be reasonable to one another.
I can think of at least ten solutions off the head but nobody's moving a finger to do anything about it.
The message I'm getting out of all this is "Wait a month or perhaps two, what's the big deal".
Do you think this is acceptable?
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Amy Leung said:
The commentaries not coming, AND that no one is doing anything to rectify the situation.
Is it so difficult? Or am I making an unreasonable request?
Actually I'm not looking for "fairness", the world is not perfect thus not fair BUT I think people should at least try to be reasonable to one another.
I can think of at least ten solutions off the head but nobody's moving a finger to do anything about it.
The message I'm getting out of all this is "Wait a month or perhaps two, what's the big deal".
Amy, I can see why you are frustrated, and I understand why you feel that way. You have placed a Pre-Pub order for a big bundle of titles that are not ready to ship. One of the titles happens to be ready today and the people who bought that title individually can get it today. People who "perhaps" are willing to "pay more" by pre-ordering more, may not have that title today because they pre-ordered a bundle deal.
It is easy to see why someone could feel like they were getting "punished" for spending more money. I completely understand your frustration. Let me see if I can help explain the situation.
The reason we are unable to deliver the Expositor's to you today, is because you did not purchase the Expositor's alone, you purchased a bundle and the bundle is not ready. It is a very different product in our sales and accounting and licensing systems.
If you would like, you may cancel your order for the bundle and put in individual orders for each title that makes up the bundle, and as soon as they are available we will charge your card and deliver each product to you. If you follow this suggestion you will be able to get Expositor's today.
Without this individual ordering arrangement, the reasons we cannot deliver just one piece of your bundle pre-order are many and varied. First, it is not ready to ship, so we legally and procedurally may not charge your card. That is also the reason that we may not deliver the product to you without payment. Do you see the problem?
We may not deliver anything you haven't paid for, and we are unable to take your payment for something we can't deliver. That is why you must either purchase Expositor's alone, or wait for the bundle.
Someone might say, "Well just give a free unlock of Expositor's to all people who have pre-ordered the bundle, they're going to get it anyway!" again, we are unable to deliver something we have not received payment for. And we have no way of just charging a portion of their bundle pre-order, and we have no way of even forcing through a charge on the pre-order. Moreover we could deliver all those Expositor's free unlocks today, and find next month we are unable to collect on many orders where they have decided they are happy with Expositor's alone (which they now have for free) or orders have been cancelled, or customers have fallen off our radar and records.
To further complicate things, this is Zondervan's content—not Logos'—and we do not have the freedom to give it away without full accounting, payment and authorization.
I would be happy to take a look at the solutions you referenced in your last post and see if there is a creative idea we have not considered that could satisfy this desire to get Expositor's early while still maintaining a Pre-Pub order for the bundle.
-Dan
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Dan,
Thanks for taking the time to give a thorough explanation. I accept that you can't release a product I haven't paid for. I also accept that you have systems in place that may not be able to be altered just for this one unusual case. Can I suggest two possible methods that may be considered:
- Allow the use of a small payment plan on this product (two-three months, preferably without the admin fee). Then licence the whole bundle to us now. That way payments are staggered, just as the resources are staggered (I know it won't be a complete correlation, but it's better than nothing).
- Allow people like Amy to ask CS to charge their card now, knowing that she will receive products as/when they become available.
To make either of these suggestions work, you may need to create a new 'product' (Zondervan 87-volume, Pradis discount, early release), so that your systems can cope. That way you can give those who request it the full licence now, without giving the same to everyone else who has ordered the standard 87-volume bundle. The great thing about Logos 4 is that if you give us the full licence now, L4 will automatically download the new resources as/when they are published.
Regards,
Mark
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
Thanks for taking the time to give a thorough explanation. I accept that you can't release a product I haven't paid for. I also accept that you have systems in place that may not be able to be altered just for this one unusual case. Can I suggest two possible methods that may be considered:
- Allow the use of a small payment plan on this product (two-three months, preferably without the admin fee). Then licence the whole bundle to us now. That way payments are staggered, just as the resources are staggered (I know it won't be a complete correlation, but it's better than nothing).
- Allow people like Amy to ask CS to charge their card now, knowing that she will receive products as/when they become available.
To make either of these suggestions work, you may need to create a new 'product' (Zondervan 87-volume, Pradis discount, early release), so that your systems can cope. That way you can give those who request it the full licence now, without giving the same to everyone else who has ordered the standard 87-volume bundle. The great thing about Logos 4 is that if you give us the full licence now, L4 will automatically download the new resources as/when they are published.
Mark, thanks for the ideas.
You and Amy are correct, there are plenty of future looking ideas and ways we could dedicate programming resources to change the existing system to accomplish the goal. Unfortunately they all take staff off other urgent projects and reassign them to address an issue that will go away in three weeks on its own. I haven't been able to come up with any way yet to work with the current system to make it happen though. Here's where the ideas meet the reality of implementation: timing.
The challenge right now is that creating any new system would most likely take longer than the few weeks it will take for the entire bundle to ship. Any changes we would be able to programatically make would most likely not be finished in time to do this. Also, payment plans are incompatible with the Pre-Pub system and actually can't be integrated currently. The entire bundle has not been created, and the internal pieces it needs to actually be licensed to a user have not either. There is no license for the entire thing that we can deliver today. It doesn't exist.
As far as charging cards today, we are unable to do that either, because while the product is on Pre-Order it is programatically incapable of being charged. This is a safety feature forced into the system so that we don't have an accident and charge someone or sell something that doesn't yet exist. This fail-safe is programmed in on purpose just so we can't do this. It protects the customers and our ability to continue to operate within Visa/Mastercard acceptance compliance.
Since we do want to provide the best customer service in the world, please feel free to contact me personally with your requests and I will go over your options with you and see if there is any possible way to make sure you are taken care of! dan@logos.com
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Hi Dan,
Another option is to shelve each individual title until the whole bundle is done and ship everything at once. [:D] I AM JOKING, People. That would kill the staff in the shipping department.
Besides, there is probably a contractural obligation to get everything out the door ASAP.
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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Dan Pritchett said:
Amy, I can see why you are frustrated...
Dan, thanks anyway for taking time to explain the situation. I would not have ordered the whole bundle had I known this was going to happen!!! I'm still most unhappy about the whole thing. Let' see what we can make out of all this.
Dan Pritchett said:If you would like, you may cancel your order for the bundle and put in individual orders for each title that makes up the bundle, and as soon as they are available we will charge your card and deliver each product to you. If you follow this suggestion you will be able to get Expositor's today.
How should I go about? Will I get charged more than I am now? I hope I wouldn't be or else I'm being penalized for going either way!
What about Mark's suggestions, or my other suggestions (in my email to Joe)?
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Amy,
I haven't seen your email to Joe but if you forward it to me at dan@logos.com I'd be happy to take a look. Whatever solution we come up with, we will definitely make sure you aren't charged more than your bundle price after it is all said and done.
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Mark Barnes said:
So we'll have to wait at least a month to get Expositors
Thanks Mark, I was going to ask what when those that ordered the bundle would be able to download the resources. I had purchased the Pradis NIV Commentary at a STEEP discount last year in a bargain bin, turned out to be a great investment, and I could not turn down the deal with the discount applying to the whole bundle.
It is interesting that I have to wait this month to receive my EBC, as the lesson of the month at my son and daughter's TaeKwonDo class is "patience" so I will get to hear that word four nights a week, while I sit there with my tablet and study without my EBC, and other resources.[:'(]
Guess my what lesson will be on for the Youth on Wed. night. . . no not patience, but it may not hurt if I posted it here (its on bitterness Heb 12:15–17) [6])
In Christ,
Dave
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Dan, thanks for all your help. The EBC has finished downloading, Logos completed indexing and I'm reading it already. [:)]
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Excellent! You are welcome Amy, glad we could get this taken care of!
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This has got to be one of the best examples of international customer service I've watched in some time. Mark, in the UK, begins this thread with a query to verify something resembling a rumor at 6:56a.m. At 8:44p.m. the thread is concluded with our dear sister in Hong Kong as happy as she can be. And all of it deftly handled throughout the ensuing discussion that included more about Logos' business practices than I needed to know.
[Y]I don't know about anyone else, but I am duly impressed.[Y]
God bless
{charley}
running Logos Bible Software 6.0a: Collector's Edition on HP e9220y (AMD Phenom II X4 2.60GHz 8.00GB 64-bit Win 7 Pro SP1) & iPad (mini) apps.
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A day or two before EBC was scheduled to ship, I went through and did the math and found out that the entire bundle when purchased as separate books would cost only a slightly more than the bundle costs. Furthermore, when I summed up just the really beefy reference works and left out all the fluff, the total was less than the whole bundle. So I cancelled my order for the bundle and ordered all the reference works (and Fee's "How to Read the Bible..." books) individually. So my EBC came right away, and I'm saving a couple hundred bucks, and I don't have to deal with any fluff and I'm a happy camper.
Amy, I'm glad you had your situation resolved so quickly. That's the Logos I know and love. [:)]
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