Odd that you would jump to that conclusion. To answer your question, though, each time we have a pre-ordered product, that means there is often a long span of time between when a customer orders, and when their order ships. When we do get to the point where we are preparing to ship a customer’s pre-order, we then email them to confirm their shipping address, in case it’s changed in the mean time.
That’s all this first batch of emails were. We were getting updated shipping information for the first week or so’s worth of laptops we can ship through, so we have all that information ready. We want to ship these out and get through the backorder as soon as possible, so each week or so we’ll send out a new batch of these pre-shipping emails so we have up-to-date shipping information and can get through these quickly.
We really want to get through this backlog and hit shipping parity. We are hoping with the help of some overtime, to get through the current backlog by the end of April. That’s our internal goal at least. Depending on how things go that might bleed into May.
We are still waiting for the first pallet of laptops to arrive at our fulfillment facility (early last week we expected them to arrive by the end of the week, giving us plenty of time to start shipping by end of March, but international shipping these days is pretty crazy). So at this point we will probably slip a couple days and may not ship the first laptops out until a day or two into April. But after that point it will be off to the races.
I fully understand where you are coming from. And I highly respect you and the company for the work you are doing.
However, I just have an complaint. I feel as if a tad bit more transparency would be nice. And I know life happens like the unforseen pandemic and issues arising. That is natural and expected honestly. One thing I didn’t like was the fact there were many posts that were misleading. And delays are all good and shows how this company really puts in the work to ensure the product meets expectations. But I would’ve been more helpful to hold off on announcing any expected shippings to avoid this dissatisfaction. More estimated time frame be more better than saying how the product will ship by this month, only to be met with more issues and pushed to the next month which was a trend for awhile. You’re kinda creating this increased expectations that it will be coming at that time only to be fooled more than once.
It would be nice just to have this honesty about the issues you are having and wanting to spend the time to have things up to the standards instead of finding out about more delays. Just having estimations and giving a heads up about something coming out later than sooner kinda eases the tension and makes users aware about the time frame to be less active on forums attempting to see who is first getting whatever and growing more impatient. With the trend of delays, it is kinda an accurate prediction for users to say more delays are coming when there is a trend if that happening consistently.
Again, I highly respect you and the work purism has done and will still lbe glad to support you guys. Just, for future reference or something, a bit more mindfulness is nice and transparency is nice. Keep up the awesome work, and I don’t mind the mistakes since it makes you better. You guys have been very transparent for the products and simiar things. But it seems shipping is often a concern not because of waiting, but the constant delays instead of an estimation that takes in account the flow of issues and time needed to fix those would be better than thinking it will be here by whatever the month it’s supposed to be. Plus for what it is worth, you guys do a lot of the best work to protect user privacy and much more. So not wanting to add stress ontop of that, just put less stress and worry for you guys with being open about twining and estimations for deliveries instead of being used to he delays that happen consistently. Hope you and this company continues to grow and get more support it deserves, even if some mistakes can be a bit annoying, you guys are open about it and that’s great since you guys put in the work to make worth the support.
I don’t think it was a smokescreen and think saying so is a bit more antagonistic than constructive.
Antagonism aside, perhaps because this isn’t the fist instance of saying “X will happen in Y days” with one or more follow-up statements of “everything is still on schedule” and then there being a delay announced just before or sometimes after the target date is missed?
This also appears to be another example of trying to cut things close instead of having a bigger buffer. From your message here it reads as if the scheduled plan was to have approximately 2 business days to start shipping leaving very little margin for error. Perhaps the original ETA was earlier in the month and there were multiple delays in shipment that you buffered, but that’s not how your message currently reads to me.
I actually don’t think this is the better approach, but rather to announce a delay sooner with a bit of detail. For instance, if there were multiple shipping delays that were buffered so that we, the customers, would only see the one delay; announcing that delay to us sooner saying “hey our shipper has suffered X number of delays and that is pushing our schedule out Y weeks” would be the more consumer friendly experience. And if the shipment did arrive and they were able to start shipping earlier than the timeline of the final delay that’s a positive surprise instead of a negative one.
I’ve worked with several vendors to track product on the water from China and consistently get very timely updates from them regarding those shipments, I would expect Purism to also get reasonably timely updates from the shipper/logistics company.
Announcing Monday that they haven’t received the shipment they expected at the end of last week is not a timely update and should not have been a surprise internally, if it was that is a separate problem with multiple possible solutions.
So that was your plan? just to make sure you have the right addresses? When you say, there will be shipments in March, you mean one or two on the 31st?
You say, “You’re still waiting for the first pallet of laptops to arrive at your distribution center and that gives you enough time to start shipping by the end of March.”
What we want to know for example is how many L14’s does this pallet represent and if you had enough time to start shipping, why is it that today 3/30 we have no returns yet?
With all due respect, as I am a very patient person, I am starting to get a vein in my forehead, especially when I see “shipments from March” and you tell us that in May it could bleed again so we will still have nothing… it stings.
The words honesty and transparency get used a lot in this forum, and over the years what I’ve discovered is that regardless of how much information one shares, if there is some question left unanswered (even if it’s because we don’t know the answer), then we “aren’t being transparent” or “aren’t being honest” even though I’d argue our transparency and honesty is the cause of many of these same complaints. We are sharing the pain of industry delays, disappointments, and everything else that is the reason people say “hardware is hard.”
This is an innate problem with doing a pre-order campaign and trying to do it with as much transparency as we can. You are seeing all of this pain each step of the way. More or less every product has some degree of the same pain, disappointment, and delay, and it’s rare that you can predict delays in advance (by definition, because you’d factor it into your estimates). In the case of products that pop up one day in a completed state w/o any prior warning, the company isn’t sharing with you all the delays, problems and issues that may have plagued that project.
We have done precisely what you have asked from us over the months. However we cannot predict the future. We collect information, make good faith estimates based on the best information at the time, then publish that information as often as we can.
This has been an incredibly challenging year, and if you review our Librem 14 posts for the past year you will see the issues that have cropped up, how often they caused delays, how often we made good faith estimates that turned out to be wrong, and how we have written about the problems each time. When those problems have changed our estimates, we’ve made new, good faith estimates based on this new information.
There is not much more I can do apart from give estimates based on the best information we have at a particular time, and then if an issue arises, share it with everyone as soon as we reasonably can, and answer the questions we can answer.
And I’m guessing the “Orders placed today ship May 2021” on the L14 purchase page is not accurate anymore. Late June or July is likely much closer, for those that ordered in April even.
You would be guessing incorrectly. As I said, in my first post of today, we internally have a goal of getting through the whole backlog of orders by the end of April, which may bleed into the first week or two of May depending on how things go, so based on that the estimate of an order today shipping some time in May is accurate.
As always, if something crops up that changes that (such as an influx of new orders that increases the backlog significantly), then we’ll update that estimate.
We have been saying for awhile the plan was for shipping to begin in March (including in the title of this thread). We have clarified for folks that may have assumed we’d somehow also get through all the backlog in March that we are just talking about when shipping begins. We have a lot of orders to get through and that takes time.
Starting last week have begun the process of contacting the first group of orders to confirm addresses so everything is ready to start shipping. Up until this weekend, it looked like everything was still on to be able to begin shipping by the end of the month. As of today it looks like it will slip a few days, but not more than that. If that changes I’ll try to let everyone know.
WIth respect to May, all I’m saying is that the goal is to get through the entire year’s backlog of orders in the month of April. That’s our internal goal and with a lot of overtime we hope to achieve it, but I’m not promising all backorders will be fulfilled by then, it could very well take us until the first week or two of May to get through all of those orders.
For the most part (outside of explicit crowdfunding campaigns where we publish a progress bar) we don’t share our sales data, and that includes the various ways that you can extrapolate that sales data from other metrics.
I like and applaud the goal in general; however, having a goal that is based on “a lot of overtime” seems fairly high risk and not a conservative setting of expectations.
I see you saying it’s not a promise to get through the entire backlog in that time, but it does read as if the expectation you’re setting is that you should at least get through the backlog that exists today in that time period.
I agree that it’s unreasonable to expect that a spike in orders wouldn’t affect hitting shipping parity; that shouldn’t affect the shipment of orders placed before today. As such I don’t think it would be unreasonable for a person reading this that ordered yesterday to have the expectation that they should Editreceive their laptop receive their laptop shipping notification by the middle of May; which may not be the actual shipment if the customer doesn’t reply promptly to the address confirmation email, after all you’re expecting to hit parity by then assuming no huge spike in orders so even if there is a spike that would only delay parity not the orders placed before the spike.
Fair catch, that is my mistake. I did mean “receive their laptop shipping notification” which may not be the actual shipment if the customer doesn’t reply promptly to the address confirmation email.
We were given a very detailed explanation of the current status; a current delay of a couple of delays, which is a delay of the shipment to Purism; and that shipping from Purism is immenent and will commence after the shipment to Purism arrives; also shipping parity should be reached around mid May barring any unexpected delays or unexpected order spikes.
There is always the possibility of something coming up unexpectedly, that is not saying “there will be more delays”.
Sometimes things are nuanced and impracticle to boil down to 140 characters without breaking the meaning.
