What you are all saying is correct. If there is going to be a delay, say that. Tell the truth. Do what you say and don’t say things that make you look like your lying.
Everyone needs to stop using Covid, fires, floods, the dog ate my homework excuses.
When I start my first business I was told by a long time sales rep, “There are 3 things that make a small company raise to the top and stay there. 1. Good Quality 2. Great Customer service 3. Consistency”
I asked him what about “Price”? He said “price doesn’t matter if even one of the 3 are missing”.
I said “what about things out of my control”? He said, “Its your business, and your responsibility to plan for that”. What did he mean by that? Simple, sell what you have.
Example: The Bit Runner and Bit Zero where both out of stock. Where they pre selling those? NO. They would Email you when they were back in stock. Expectation set.
But the second you take someone’s money and give them an estimated ship date your now at the mercy of raw material suppliers and everything in between. That is what we are seeing here.
Pre orders are a different type of beast. Similar to a kick starter. When signing up for a pre-order I feel that it is implied that it will ship when it is ready…carbide has never let me down, they have great quality,…customer service on the day to day is spot on. This new product is just that a new product with many moving parts that they don’t have control over. They tried to give their best guess.
I personally believe on your 3 points made above but being in the wood working business. Consistency in materials is impossible to guess. Many of times I have to push dates out. But I make sure the quality makes up for that. I truly believe carbides quality will make up for the delay in shipping.
Have faith…its the only thing you have left. Carbide all ready has your money.
I think that everyone loves Carbide for their Transparency
They admit when there are issues and try and resolve it. There is frustration because we (the people awaiting orders) do not feel like Carbide is being Transparent which is out of character.
Additionally, as you await your new toy, you build up an excitement and anticipation of all of the stuff you are going to build. Understood that the goal post might be moving, but if you provide us with an updated shipping window, you will allow us to reset our expectation, which is important because based on the learnings from this forum, you need a good dedicated week to get it working flawlessly (CNC version of flawless ) and we the recipients of this new toy are planning our schedules around them
First off its not a point of view, ever hear of a “business plan”? I have built and sold 4 very successful business and am retired at age 40. That didn’t happen by chance. It took planning.
In the recession of 2008 when business like mine where folding up iIgrew by over $1 million. Again not by chance or by making excuses. Life gives you lemons you don’t squeeze them in your customers eye.
I didn’t buy this as a “preorder”, it was a lead time. Just like if you buy custom made cabinetry. They tell you 4-6 weeks, not “whenever we get it done Mr Smith, after all these are custom”. This isn’t a “kickstarter” either. Any fan boys here??
"Sell what you have "= sell what you have completed. We’er not talking about parts, we are talking about a product. This isn’t rocket science.
Look, did Covid screw a lot of business, yes. But this Shapoko Pro was released for sale well after Covid. That means there should have been a discussion about how it would affect lead times and “plan accordingly”.
I’m not saying Carbide3d is a horrible company, but they haven’t planned well for this product launch and haven’t responded to the issue.
I left a voice-mail 3 days ago and still never got a call back. What explanation do you have for that? If they had called and apologized then this thread probably wouldn’t even exist. As a business owner you take the slap and make the needed changes. Don’t ignore and hide from your customers, or glaze over.
FWIW every new product I ordered since March (from 4 different vendors) has taken ~3-6 months to arrive. Most were up front about the expected timeframe, but every single one was at least a month late. I have seen from other vendors the issues with UPS truck limitations as well for several months, so it’s not a made up thing. You can even find articles online about UPS putting limitations per vendor.
FYI I have been waiting on my new sectional to be delivered for 18 weeks…
Speaking of custom cabinets that is what I currently do and I have had to tell many customers that they have a choice of me making with less than ideal materials, they need to wait, or pay out the rear for me to get materials shipped from Timbuktu…
The rollout of the Shapeoko pro is obviously not one we’re happy with, and clearly customers who’ve been waiting for the machine past 30 days are not happy either.
We provided our best timeline at the time, and we were wrong, and honestly our optimism got the better of us. We were honest about the delays and we’d hoped we’d be able to cut in the lead time, but we didn’t. It’s a good lesson for us for any new product launches, which will be very different given the unexpected delays we experienced with the pro, and the frustration experienced by our customers. I won’t enumerate the sequence of events that propagated the delays here because I don’t think it’ll be productive.
As of today your order is one day past the 30 day timeline and our sales team gave you a new eta of 12/28 based on our latest shipping schedule, which is two weeks past our original estimate. We’re doing everything we can to ship orders as soon as possible.
It’s been our experience that if customers are this unhappy with the company (us) even before they’ve received their machine, no matter how good the machine turns out to be, the relationship is soured. If you’re past the point of frustration and prefer to cancel the order, I completely understand, even though we want to be able to turn the relationship around and have you working with your Shapeoko pro, making chips, as soon as possible. I’ve tagged your latest email in our ticketing system so that I can be your point person and we can chat about it further.
I’m locking this thread because it seems we’re past the point of constructive discourse.
) and we the recipients of this new toy are planning our schedules around them