Alright strap in boys and girls, this is gonna be a long post.
Dude, where's my invoice?
Firstly, for many here this might be your first or second group buy and it can seem odd that the invoices have stopped going out. Have they cancelled? Am I still on the list of participants?
In terms of group buy invoicing, if you've looked around for a payment processor that supports this mode of buying/selling you'll quickly find that most big name processors class this mode of transaction as "high-risk" , given the time required for the completion of the buy and how long it takes for the buyer to receive the product. Unfortunately, this includes every buyer's favourite website: PayPal. Given my phone conversations with PayPal, preoders are a grey area and they're not very open to hosting such GBs on their platform. If you'd look at the GBs that happen on GH it's quite common to see runners tellling the participants that their account has been frozen, and some buys have completely collapsed simply because PayPal does not officially support the GB model. In order to mitigate such an issue we've moved to Shopify where preorders are allowed, and we've used it for a couple of buys now.
However, last week while we were sending out invoices we received a notice that our account was put on hold. This has never happened after so many buys/keyset proxies, and so we complied with Shopify's request for more info. We've not heard back from them since then, and we've been trying to get their support to escalate our ticket. Unfortunately Shopify does not have a local phone number that we can call, and text support is rather minimal. We've had our ticket priority raised but that's all we have heard for now. We've decided to hold off invoicing any further in order to prevent money from being stuck, and as of today I still have no reply from them despite multiple emails.
What's next:
We're gonna give some more time before we make a decision, but here are a few likely scenarios:
1. We cancel the buy and refund those who've paid.
The GB dies, your dream of having the best TKL of 2018 dies with it. We all feel sad and start ****posting in this thread blaming capitalism and stuff like that, you get the idea. This is our last resort only if we cannot find a way to get the boards to you.
2. We move to another processor.
We've been trying to work it out with other payment processors behind the scenes, and quite frankly before this incident Shopify was our best platform since they had consistent payout and charged acceptable fees. We've all heard so many horror stories about PayPal, and despite having all my savings frozen during a previous buy I've initiated some communication with their local CS to figure out how we can possibly use PayPal for this buy. I still have my reservations over this move but I'm hoping that this is an option. We're also considering using Stripe, but there are reports of frozen Stripe accounts as well, way more compared to Shopify so I'm quite split on that.
3. FCFS.
Another option that is on the table would be having me buy some units ahead of time and sell it as FCFS once they're all done. This option limits the number of boards we can purchase, since I'm not made of OTDs but I'm aiming to get at least 25 units each if we do end up going this route.
So that's a lengthy explanation for why you've not received any invoices so far, we're still trying to work out the whole thing but I'd like to reiterate that this is the first time we've had this happen with Shopify so it came kinda randomly as well (they've not said anything about why we were put on hold so go figure). We'll let you guys know as soon as we receive more info. As of now, please don't request refunds even though only 5 of you've been invoiced, appreciate everyone's patience!
TLDR: Life is short, don't be a vendor.