Read the bold if you don't care about the details.
Okay, so I've had an interesting morning so far. When I got my expected email from Melissa back today, I was in for a bit of a surprise. Unbeknownst to me, the sorting fee isn't some "$35 and we'll sort em," sort of deal, its $.05 per keycap. I was just going to cover it and wasn't even worried about it, so lol. That put the sorting fee at ~$800 for this group buy, which as you could imagine, wasn't going to work in the slightest. Since I obviously can't afford to just shell out an extra $810 or spend weeks sorting the almost 15,000 keycaps myself, while risking errors and losses since I am in no way set up to do that, I would have to refund and resend all the invoices, with an average increase in price of $5 per set ordered. I didn't even have to come on here and ask what everyone would have thought of that, I knew nobody would be too happy about it. So, in the sprit of keeping this group buy going and me not refunding the money entirely and canceling/starting over, I was able to negotiate the fee down to $0.02, putting the fees at $298.38. Combine that with $45 for shipping, and we have $343.38 to raise.
I'm going to cover it for now so this group buy goes forward, but bear in mind that that consumes pretty much all of the funds I was going to get from everyone after 100 orders in order for me to buy extras. For those that don't remember, the original price for 100-150 was $43, but with the majority's consent I changed it to $45 in order for me to be able to raise funds for this. We hit 132 sets in the end, so I collected a good $264 toward my purchase of extras. Add the extra $100 or so from the handling charge etc etc and it pretty much breaks even. That said, I now have to fund my own purchase of extras, and blah blah blah if I want to make some money, so while I am going to do that (12 sets, half TKL and half Full Size to sell @ $65 and $85 respectively) it is going to be quite a burden on me to fund that. Anyways, here's the deal. Just like the legend fee and other late stage fees in my previous group buys, I'm going to ask whoever ordered and feels like contributing to their portion of the fees, send a gifted payment to my account, which all of you should have by now. Yes you can PM me for it if you are too lazy to go find it. The contribution per person is pretty simple to figure out, but here it is if you failed 4th grade math.
$.02 per keycap:
Ragnorock set: 88 keys, $1.76
Tsangan set: 11 keys, $0.22
104 set: 17 keys, $.34
ISO set: 3 keys, $.06
So however many of each set you got, is what your portion of the fee is. If you recognize the risk that I am taking paying for everyone's contribution up front, then please pay for your share. Usually when I make a post asking for contribution toward unexpected fees, I maybe get 20% of it covered, usually in large part by a few guys who contribute more than their fair share. Obviously 20% of $343 isn't really all that helpful, as that only covers about 1 set's worth of materials. So please, pay your share, don't just look at it like its a couple of bucks I can afford to pay for. I know it doesn't seem like much, but with everyone not contributing that extra couple of bucks, it basically removes any and all chance of me making this worth my time. It reverts back to the original situation where I can't make any money off of this gb because it is a much larger investment to do so. If I don't buy the $600 worth of extras and just eat the loss if nobody contributes, we're looking at me paying my own money just to get everyone their keys. Just wanted to let everyone know that.
Again, this group buy was about speed and getting everyone cheap keys, so I went with this route instead of bothering with a refund and reissue of invoices. That way, the order goes in today, and not in a couple of weeks. I will probably be reposting it at the end of the thread a couple of times for maximum visibility.
Dave out.
