I ordered by 5 Pro 4x2 on the 30th. It said estimated 5 days to be shipped. The VFD said 15 days. I was like, ok I can do that. A few days go by and I send an email asking for an update. I’m told due to the sale and backlog that it will ship out the week of the 18th and that they were trying for sooner, but that was their current estimate. When I checked in today, I was told they’re shooting for JANUARY 2ND!! When I responded asking what was going to be done to make up for this, I was told that there was a blog post about possible lead time delays. Well, I ordered it nearly a week AFTER Black Friday. So if there was so much delay in orders from Black Friday, why did the sales page say only 5 days? I know the technology is there for it to automatically update based on inventory and production time. Oh, and if I hadn’t sent an email, would I even have been told that it was delayed? Haven’t received a single communication from the company without me sending one first.
If this was a cut rate overseas company pulling this bait and switch I would just shake my head and cancel my order. (They even send emails about the delays.) But from everything I’ve seen and read, it’s a quality company that does everything they can to make it right. But so far my experience has been the complete opposite. I really want this machine, but not if the company has fallen this far off from what it used to be.
Yep, you got that right. So, comparatively speaking, between the length of time that is called “delay” and the length of time that you’ll keep and use your new Shapeoko, isn’t this “delay” still a very small amount of time?
Now, if you were to buy one of the big boy’s cnc machines, they wouldn’t even start building it until you paid for it. Then it would be six months before you see the email that it is almost ready to ship. FYI.
In addition
It takes a lot technology and money to have your inventory feed your web site. I assume it is manually updated. It is unfortunate it was missed The good news is they are shipping a lot of machines as it is a great machine and people want them.
As a general statement, Consumers believe it so easy to implement technology, I can tell you , it is not, and it is not cheap. The fact is C3D is a awesome growing SMB company in an exciting evolving market. maybe having some growing pains.
Amazon has quite the web site, tons of tech and even still, I would guess 15 - 20 % of my orders go wrong, in some way or another.
The latest is for 8 ish weeks now, every 5 - 10 days they pooch my CC info in the backend and I find out the next day my order was denied. I have over 20 hours of my time into this and have been escalated through 7 departments over multiple phone calls, And still no fix. Just saying, to me, it not that easy or simple as people may think.
That said, yes it unfortunate I hope they get through the backlog soon for you.
Hang in there it will be worth it
I like Carbide 3d and their product. I had their s03 and now I have an s5 pro. I will say this, their attention to detail has definitely gone downhill recently. There’s been a lot of people receiving machines that are missing parts or having issues with their VFDs not working. Also, one thing I absolutely hate about my s5 is that it does not retract the spindle when you pause a job, a feature that I had loved and grown used to on my s03 and I can’t believe it is missing from the s5 without a suitable alternative. My s5 was also missing parts when it arrived but I was able to get them within a few days after notifying C3D.
That being said, outside of those issues, I still enjoy my s5. So far it has been working well but I am dreading the day I upgrade to a spindle based on what I’ve read. This is honest feedback from someone who has given the company over $6k in the last 4 years. There’s a lot of company fanboys on this site that are ok with a company shipping out machines that do not work as intended so long as the company makes it good in the end. Personally, I’m not one of those and I think C3D would do themselves well to recognize there is a problem and fix it within before they continue to push out products that don’t work and get a bad reputation. Not all of their customers are electrical engineers and the customer should not have to troubleshoot their product before any action is taken on their part. Thankfully, there are a lot of smart people in this community and most issues can be resolved by the people here in this forum but I still believe it’s a bad business practice that I hope they fix soon. My $.02.
And I get that, which is why when they changed from 5 days to nearly 3 weeks I was okay with it. But when that estimate changes again to 5 weeks is where I have the problem. And the fact that the only way I even knew about the additional delay was because I emailed them. It’s not hard to send customers update emails when they’re dropping over $4K on your products. And Sales responding to my email with, well we made a blog post that said there were delays, is also not acceptable. I didn’t even know there was a blog, and when I did find it there wasn’t a single post about delays from Black Friday. A single email would have alleviated all this. Send a form letter to every customer explaining what is going on, apologize for the delay, explain what they are doing to resolve it, and updating estimated shipping times. Not hard to do at all.
As for the tech required to keep a site updated, C3D makes advanced CNC software. If they can’t integrate their inventory and production times to auto update, then I would be amazed. I work in tech, and do inventory management stuff daily. I know without even looking a rough estimate of what I have, what the repair times would be, and about how many spare devices I have to replace broken ones. And I’m not a programmer and use spreadsheets to do this. If I actually looked at my sheet I could get it down to within a couple days.
I DO want this machine, and I DO love what has been said about them from lots of different places and people whose opinion I trust. (Shoutout to Matt Outlaw @731woodworks and Andy Bird @AndyBirdBuilds ) Everyone says how good they are about making things right when there is a problem. But that appears to only be when it is a hardware problem, not a customer service problem. That’s the part I’m having the biggest problem with.
The good news is they are shipping a lot of machines as it is a great machine and people want them.