My little one always comes first!
Totally understand that! A suggestion from someone who's worked in ecommerce for a long long time though. You shouldn't keep talking about how you're *about* to ship then turn around and say you haven't shipped yet. Just pick a realistic date in the future and use that for communication. It will lead to happier customers and fewer customer service inquiries. Additionally, just for the sake of legal compliance, you should make it very clear on the checkout form that this is a preorder and although payment may be captured immediately, the order may not be fulfilled for a year.
I do agree that our website lacks faq and disclaimers. I'd love some help with copywriting.
I got the keys from GMK at the end of July. So it hasn't been close to a year either.
We should have paid the extra money to get the keys sorted. It would have saved cody and bunny alot of time.
All of the extra money was spent adding additional keys to the set. You can find both mockups in the OP.
I definitely learned to not sort group buys of this magnitude by myself again.
Apologies that I wasn't clear. When I say a year, I mean from time of purchase. A standard ecommerce order which is compliant with all rules and regulations will authorize the payment method and retain that authorization until the order has been shipped, at which time the authorization will be captured. Preorders are a special case where you need to be explicit in what you plan to do with the authorizations. Any data you can save that indicates that the customer has read and accepted your terms is very helpful in case someone lodges a complaint and you find yourself audited. Some places, like amazon, will maintain the authorization for a very long time but never capture until the order is shipped. This is because they operate on a huge scale and would constantly need to issue refunds or be the middle man in cases where the preorder cannot be fulfilled. When purchasing on ctrlalt, the date that was displayed with the group buy was the end date for sales, which could fall into a gray area in terms of setting customer expectations. There are many people who purchased a year ago only seeing that date related to the end of the group buy. The reality is that you need to protect yourself when selling online.
Cheers
While I agree what we need disclaimers for our website. I would place them strictly just to let people unfamiliar with our group buys know. (redditors, other forums)
We operate way differently and aren't really a "company". We are a group of friends and this is just a website we made to keep track of everything. Our sister site aims to be more compliant and I'd love to speak with you more about that later. I do appreciate the concerns.
I have realized the date is misleading if your unfamiliar and I've added an explicit shipping date/eta to all group buys to help avoid this confusion.
I've looked into authorization and capture before and Stripe only allows us to hold the authorization for 7 days which doesn't really work for us in any situation. However we are currently evaluating the alternatives for upcoming group buys.
