I had planned and budgeted for the Home Integration System, so as it gets closer and closer to my truck arriving, I was starting to get a little nervous that sunrun never reached out too me. Then 3 weeks ago they did, but of course I'm in a state they don't cover. Fine, I'll just order the kit and have my own electrician install it.
So I go to AEEexpress and try and "register" as a ford customer, and can't do it. There is a weird AWS error, I can't make an account. I call the 800 number on AEEexpress, because I went there from a sunrun link it turns out its sunruns 800 number. I spent hours on hold and passed from person to person, until finally someone admitted they have no idea why its giving that error, and they can't recreate it. They said they would call back after talking to some IT people. They couldn't make me an account and let me do a password reset on it, they couldn't take the order over the phone, they had absolutely no flexibility.
The next day I got a call from the support person, she seamed to have a feeling of urgency and a desire to help, but reported she had no update yet, but was working on it and pestering people to figure it out, and I'm not alone, a subset of people are having the same problem with the website.
Unrelated to this, at work recently there was a webtool that I needed to use but was genlocked by IP, so if you weren't in OH you couldn't access the tool, it wasn't intentional and working with that company they removed it so my coworkers and I could access the tool. (It was a procurement tool one of our customer requires suppliers use)
That experience got me thinking, what if AEEexpress has something like that going on, I used a VPN (shout out NordVPN) and made it look like my IP was in California. AEEexpress worked, I was able to make my account, place the order, get confirmation, etc. I'm not 100% why this worked out, the order of the fields in the form changed, if I was on the VPN it was in one order, if I was off the VPN it was in a different one. At work there is also a bunch of security/privacy requirements, so a lot of trackers and stuff get blocked. My current hypotheses is the website in California is different because California has some special privacy laws other states don't have, and when I was accessing the site in my home state the security stuff was breaking some kind of tracker on the page that caused the whole thing to fail.
tl;dr if your having trouble making an account on AEEexpress try using a VPN to make it look like your are browsing the internet from California. Also expected ship date is September, so all the anxiety of feeling of urgency was pointless anyway.
So I go to AEEexpress and try and "register" as a ford customer, and can't do it. There is a weird AWS error, I can't make an account. I call the 800 number on AEEexpress, because I went there from a sunrun link it turns out its sunruns 800 number. I spent hours on hold and passed from person to person, until finally someone admitted they have no idea why its giving that error, and they can't recreate it. They said they would call back after talking to some IT people. They couldn't make me an account and let me do a password reset on it, they couldn't take the order over the phone, they had absolutely no flexibility.
The next day I got a call from the support person, she seamed to have a feeling of urgency and a desire to help, but reported she had no update yet, but was working on it and pestering people to figure it out, and I'm not alone, a subset of people are having the same problem with the website.
Unrelated to this, at work recently there was a webtool that I needed to use but was genlocked by IP, so if you weren't in OH you couldn't access the tool, it wasn't intentional and working with that company they removed it so my coworkers and I could access the tool. (It was a procurement tool one of our customer requires suppliers use)
That experience got me thinking, what if AEEexpress has something like that going on, I used a VPN (shout out NordVPN) and made it look like my IP was in California. AEEexpress worked, I was able to make my account, place the order, get confirmation, etc. I'm not 100% why this worked out, the order of the fields in the form changed, if I was on the VPN it was in one order, if I was off the VPN it was in a different one. At work there is also a bunch of security/privacy requirements, so a lot of trackers and stuff get blocked. My current hypotheses is the website in California is different because California has some special privacy laws other states don't have, and when I was accessing the site in my home state the security stuff was breaking some kind of tracker on the page that caused the whole thing to fail.
tl;dr if your having trouble making an account on AEEexpress try using a VPN to make it look like your are browsing the internet from California. Also expected ship date is September, so all the anxiety of feeling of urgency was pointless anyway.
