struggles with ordering fun

recently a "blogebrity" decided to get the production team that helped with her latest book some really cute coffee mugs. And of course everyone else wanted them to, so she set up where we could order our own mugs.

The mugs had on one side

Trust me, I'm a Prefessional

the other side said

Leave Blank

The prefessional typo was a joke on the team as they had goofed the cover of her book and had to go back and place a sticker over the typo... I totally never bothered to lift the sticker on my book until she said to!

The leave blank was a typical thing that we see on cake wrecks all the time where the bakers will put the instructions on the cakes.

However, when I placed my order I received an email...

Thank you for your order

Your absolute satisfaction is our first priority. Our Quality Assurance team carefully reviews each order, and has discovered an issue with the design of one or more of your products:

Title: Trust Me, I'm A Prefessional (Green)

Design Issue:
--- The design of your product is missing text or image in the template field. Please feel free to re-order your personalized design in the given template fields on the product page. If you wish to have the template field blank, please be sure to delete the field in our design tools while customizing your product.

I sent them a response back...

My order was canceled and you sent this message "The design of your product is missing text or image in the template field. "
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???
I would like the item that I ordered and I don't mind waiting for it...this is for me, not a gift.

I then tried to place my order again (as they have not removed the mug) and it was canceled with an email stating that the image didn't meet with their content policy.  I also got this response to my customer service request.

The reply:

Our system indicates that your order was cancelled by our Content Management Team, at which time a notification was automatically sent to the email address associated with your order. This message contained an explanation of any content restrictions, design failures or other criteria which factored into the cancellation of your order. It also includes instructions on how to re-order any items which have already been approved by our Content Management Team.

My reply to that:

The problem is that you are apparently filling orders for this item for some folks but not others. I found out later that everyone's order got canceled. The "image" in question is just text that was provided by the designer from real mistakes on cakes.

Please check the item (link provided to them) and explain to me how the image doesn't meet with your content policy. (I provided a link to their content policy page) I'm totally confused as to how "Trust Me, I'm A Prefessional" and "Leave Blank" violate any of your content policy.

Thank you for your time. I realize that this is a busy time of year.

I've deleted the info on what company we are dealing with here in hopes that the matter can be resolved and I'll get my mug. However, if they still want to be a pain about it, I'll be happy to tell you who it is.  I wonder if they have that system where they get notified when people mention them online???

Honestly, I feel that what is really going on here is that they were running a sale on mugs that day and were bombarded by fans of the blog wanting these mugs. The company might have gotten confused by the Leave Blank joke and just flagged it. But instead of checking with the designer about the content they just flagged it as unacceptable and canceled orders. :(

UPDATE: First the blogebrity contacted them and learned that 1) they canceled ALL the orders for the mug because the "Leave Blank" part confused them. She talked to the content review folks who were supposed to figure everything out. 2) If we emailed the company we could get a code so that we could still get the discount that was running when we first placed or orders.

So I emailed. I included the two order numbers that were canceled. However, customer service and content review must not speak to each other because customer service was shocked that someone else was telling me what to do about their website...and that while I had been advised to contact content review they showed no record of that happening. SIGH!

Honestly this isn't worth it to me anymore. Sure the mug was cute, but it was awfully expensive even with the discount...especially when we get tons of free mugs all the time.

By the way Zazzle.com I won't ever be ordering or trying to order from you again.