I ordered a Librem 11 several weeks ago and have inquired about an “estimated” delivery time several times with no response. I am considering disputing my CC charge to get refunded the money I paid for the tablet. Does anyone have an email address for someone who is known for quick responses?
Thanks
Thanks for responding, Amarok; I’ll reach out to Jcs. I understand it is on backorder; I just want an estimated time when they expect it to be shipped.
I am not convinced that Purism has particularly meaningful estimates on backordered products. It seems that they ship these products when they themselves get the parts necessary to do so. It seems like a very human, “we get there when we get there” type of system. I’m speaking as someone who enjoys my Purism hardware and bought several things from them to support the company.
My friends and I joke about this being “Purism time.” If you are not aware of this phenomenon, and have not been reading the forums, your time pressure wherein you want to dispute the CC charge and stuff is probably going to put you into a situation where you just get more and more mad and have to dispute the charge, since you’re the one making that decision. There have been numerous forum posts by other people across time, and it seems that once a person starts to escalate this stress in their mind, there isn’t really anything to de-escalate because threatening to dispute your CC charge doesn’t make the humans at Purism work any faster. They have heard it a lot of times before, and are tired of it and know that they can’t help you, so if I had to guess based on other forum posts I’ve seen it’s probably the case that threatening to dispute like that just causes the support employees to start ignoring you until your order actually becomes available, because of how hard it would be for them to help you.
But I mean, I’m literally writing to you from a Purism Librem 14, I use the products and like the company. I’m just saying, I’ve seen some pretty mad people on the forums across time. Purism is not Amazon. I’ve seen my friend order junk on Amazon and expect it to arrive 4 hours later. I guess Jeff Bezos has a lot of money. I think Purism does not have that much money in comparison.
Thank You, @Dlonk. I appreciate your response, and your endorsement of their products helps ease my mind, a bit. I am very excited to know that I will hopefully be able to experience the joy of operating a Purism product. Please understand it from my perspective. I am an amateur Linux enthusiast who, like you, wants to support small companies doing the Lord’s work, spreading the word of Linus. I am simply asking for someone at Purism to click the reply button at the top of an email and craft a 2 minute response opining their best guess regarding when the back order might be filled. Without that simple recognition, I fear that the hopeful joy I have about one day being a Libre11 owner and user might be overruled by the pragmatic side of me that is fearful I will never again see the money I have paid to achieve that joy.
Your Friend
Tromp
I’m not sure how Purism operates. Most stores that I deal with won’t charge the credit card until the device is ready to ship. Given that most CC companies will only allow chargebacks for a limited time, I would be guided by looking at/if your credit card has been debited.
Given how Purism dealt with Librem 5 and (a few initial) Librem 14 cancellations, I would be cautious.
I am sorry to hear that Purism has not been responsive to your inquiry. Please note that the support team is incredibly busy and is working their hardest to reduce the support ticket queue. We are actively hiring and training new staff to resolve this.
Purism uses Stripe as a CC payment processor, combined with WooCommerce payment integrations. Payments via CC appear to process immediately, but there could be TBD configurations which allow payment upon fulfillment.
Fulfillment estimates are published here. We currently estimate that Librem 11 orders will be shipped in March. I notified the online operations team earlier today to update the table with this change.
Most places where I order online “stuff” expect full payment up front before they will even process my order. I think this especially applies if they in turn will be ordering it upstream e.g. I order a specific book, the online store does not actually carry that book, so they have to order it in specially from the publisher or distributor, so they want a guarantee of payment to match the upstream order.
That of course means that if they can only short supply or the item is out of stock, they will have to make a (partial) refund - which is easy if I paid by CC and a bit more tedious if I paid some other way.
It is true that a merchant can reserve part of your CC balance so that they have a guarantee of payment without triggering debt recovery against the customer but without actually receiving the funds (“pre-authorisation”) and I see that Stripe offers it - but this can in many ways be painful for both customer and merchant in equal measure. (Where I work we use this functionality for some customers.)
In the US, Visa will not let vendors finalize a charge until the item is shipped. See 7.6.1.1 or 7.6.1.2 of https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/visa-rules-public.pdf. I think that is true for most US credit cards. There is no such rule for debit cards in the US.
Partially for that reason (the complication of dealing with delayed charging) many online retailers that I deal with simply label goods as out-of-stock and won’t process backorders (they can’t be added to the cart). For example IKEA and, I think, Home Depot. Amazon only finalizes charges at the time of shipping.
[Edit: Also, importantly, if one is looking at companies with similar issues to Purism in regard to supply: Pine64 doesn’t charge until it is in the processing-for-shipping stage. Terms & Conditions - PINE STORE
… At the time your order is placed, Pine store obtains a pre-approval from “PayPal” for the amount of the order. Your PayPal billing occurs when your order is being processed for shipping …
… At the time your order is placed, Pine Store obtains a pre-approval from the credit card company with PayPal Services for the amount of the order. Your Credit Card billing occurs when your order is being processed for shipping. …
]
