Here’s all of the background information I can provide:
We use Shopify for our online store, which is really bare-bones. If you need any “extra” functionality, you need to pay for a plugin to add that function (or write your own). We pay for a “notify me” plugin from a third-party to manage the waiting list. Once the items are back in inventory, the email are supposed to be sent out to everyone on the list.
It seems to have worked, the probes began selling almost immediately and were sold out in a few days.
Because the emails are managed by the “notify me” plugin, we have no way to know if all emails were sent, if they were sent and dumped into your junk mail folder, or were filtered out by your email provider before making it to your inbox at all. (The later happens more than one would think).
We can only look at the sales rate to judge that, at worst, the plugin “mostly worked” and it was probably better than that.
We’re focused on getting caught up with the backlog and making sure we build some inventory so we’ll continue using the same plugin in the future rather than shifting effort to write our own plugin to manage the list.
Finally, we’ve made a major investment in the past few weeks to increase the production rate. Once we get it up and running, I’ll post a video- it should be pretty great.
-Rob