Topic: (old OR thread, closed and moved) - page 11. (Read 64820 times)

Well the idea is that we'd ship it on a pallet using an LCL (Less than Container Load) provider such as Thrutainer, thus reducing the transport costs down to less than our current surface mail cost (amortised over the shipment). We also won't ship any packaging material, as that can be procured locally. Every two weeks or whatever we'll arrange for a replacement shipment to go out to replenish the stock that has left the warehouse in the preceding two weeks. Even though the LCL shipment will take a month, it'll constantly be replenishing (after the first shipment arrives), so the warehouse should, in theory, always be topped up.

I'm curious about this US partner.

Your costs must be very low. 

C) WE WOULD NEVER SCREW UP MAN WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

:-P

Seriously, though, we didn't consider for a moment think that we would make the sales we have made, so we definitely had to scale up rapidly, and at the worst time of the year. A lot of the guys that received Variant A design (orders up to about 500 or so) have had to drill their own PSU holes due to a misalignment on the CNC machine. Variant B (orders 500 to about 900-ish, with some still used to meet orders up to 1300 or so due to over-fabrication of some lines) fixed that, made space for a 3rd PSU, moved the motherboard, and tried to provide support for E-ATX and miniATX motherboards, but then we've had customers say that their motherboards are too long for the 1st hole on the backbar, and they've had to drill a hole to move the brass spacer. Variant C went back to a generic motherboard mount - the E-ATX guys can just whip out a drill and move the spacer to meet their needs. But I digress...

We also didn't consider that December would be such a bad time for customs and postal processing, and that the backlog would come back to bite us in January. We've been told that from mid-February we will have no delays, and from the moment we hand parcels to customs to the moment they're on the ship/plane/donkey cart should be 7 working days tops. Whether they can stick to that commitment (they won't sign an SLA with us) remains to be seen;)

I've also heard a lot of customers complain about the length of fabrication and say stuff like "why don't you just have stock". Well, the problem with stock is that stock costs money. We've pulled people off projects to catch up on the demand, which we've done now, so they've gone back to their respective projects within the group. Our fabrication team can meet our weekly demand, and we have some buffer capacity in that, but for us to fabricate, say, 500 additional units would require we pull more people in (which is a cost). Then we'd have to cover the raw materials to fabricate those units (which is a cost). Then we'd have to warehouse those units (which is a cost). We may be part of a group of companies, but we're a startup - we don't get given free money to do whatever we want, we're expected to bootstrap ourselves. Our margins are thin on the ground, and we blew the margins with our Bitcoin Black Friday special, so there's no way we can cover the cost out of profit.

What we are doing is working with a US partner who will share in the costs attached to pre-manufacturing stock, and they will warehouse it in the US. This will be costly, but it will allow us to have an additional shipping option during checkout that will allow US customers to have it shipped from the US warehouse. We are hoping that the fee will be somewhere between surface mail and EMS.

Thanks for that Fluffy! It looks like mine just left the country then. Here is what my tracking says..


1   Comment   2014/01/22   09:13   CAPEMAIL INTERNATIONAL (HUB)   Insert item into bag Out
2   In transit   2014/01/22   02:09   CAPEMAIL (HUB)   
3   In transit   2014/01/21   15:27   GEORGE (HUB)   
4   Item accepted by branch   2014/01/21   12:03   PLETTENBERGBAAI   



I ordered! Dec 2 2013..

If it just left the country yesterday.. Im looking at another 22-30 days at the least, which is going to be around 3 months after i ordered.



Whats the sentiment over there at openrigs?



A) God dam it, Zedicus leave me alone:)

B) We soooo fucked up.

C) Oh no we never screw up.. its blah blah blahs fault.



Answer _________




Oh man i had a good laugh writing that..  
 

That notification on line 3 is their tracking system being weird, you can disregard it. The "Insert item into bag out" status means it has left the country - if you track it on http://canadapost.ca it says this as the most recent update:

2014/01/09   08:13   ZACPTD,South Africa   International item has left originating country and is en route to Canada

That's really odd - sorry about that. When you placed your order we didn't offer airmail (it was on the backend as an option, but was disabled as a user-selectable option), only surface mail and EMS. It's entirely possible that there was something screwy in the database and it put the incorrect line item on the mail, and I really apologise for that. We rebuilt all of our shipping options once we started shipping en-masse and were able to split it out geographically, so the rates are more accurate now, and that should not ever occur again. On the flip side, the boats go straight from Cape Town to NY harbour, so they're reasonably consistent once the item is on the boat, air parcels go via the UK international postal hub or the Dubai international postal hub, which makes them really unpredictable (typically around 4 weeks, but sometimes much worse). EMS is a lot more predictable.

Edit: just wanted to add, airmail is stupidly slow both ways. This is a parcel that I've been waiting for from the US since the 19th: LN005857930US. It was shipped using USPS's international airmail service, and departed the US on the 23rd of Dec, but here we are a month later and it isn't even in the country yet. I'd have had better luck if they shipped it surface mail;)

fluffy,

What does this mean?

1   Comment   2014/01/09   06:13   CAPEMAIL INTERNATIONAL (HUB)   Insert item into bag Out
2   In transit   2014/01/08   07:29   CAPEMAIL (HUB)   
3   At Office   2014/01/07   11:16   PLETTENBERGBAAI   First Notification to recipient
4   In transit   2014/01/05   17:48   GEORGE (HUB)   

For those who are waiting for their orders:  I ordered on Dec 9th, order 952.  

Still waiting..

BTW, I did not get any notification as per line 3.

Man O man... the more I wait for this package the more I think about it. Waiting so long for shipping, I was sitting here thinking to myself, "Seriously? Does it really take this long for air mail shipping?" So, I do some digging...

fluffy, can you please explain why my order confirmation email says "International Insured Air Mail" and openrigs interpretation of my order says "International Insured Surface Mail"? 

I can forward the email I have.

Did this happen to anyone else??

Wow!  How long is customs taking now?  I think mine went over Monday (#1222).

That reminds me, we should totally introduce a range made out of recycled garbage. We could call it Derelict.

I'm order 1432...I think I'll be waiting a while. My ghetto-fabulous setup will have to hold for a bit.

EMS times to the US have been really decent for us of late - check this for example: https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction!input.action?tRef=qt&tLc=1&tLabels=EE028408333ZA. From the moment we got customs pre-clearance finalised on that parcel (around Jan 15th) to final delivery was a week on the nose.

plz let us know how quick you`ll get it. As I`m still waiting for black Friday purchase with surface mail...

Wow, I didn't realize port-to-port time was 22 days!  Glad I upgraded to EMS.  Hopefully I'm mounting cards in under two weeks!

Even in bulk it'll still be more expensive - and local manufacturers will struggle to compete price-wise. South Africa is a little like China and India in that labour is cheap and plentiful, which lowers operational costs both for our raw material suppliers and for our manufacturing:)

Sounds like there is an opportunity for a reseller to buy in bulk from you... or, more likely, a US competitor.

Where do you get your aluminum from?

Use http://globaltracktrace.ptc.post/gtt.web/ instead of USPS' tracking, they don't read the "Departure from outward office of exchange" status correctly (ie. when it left the country). Bear in mind that typical vessel times from Cape Town to New York = 22 days plus processing/import on either side, which is why we say 4-6 weeks of actual shipping for surface mail.

We are busy finalising arrangements with a distributor in the US, but it will be significantly more expensive - LCL shipping to the US plus local carriage to the warehouse, storage costs, the distributor's profit, picking and packing fees, packaging material, and finally local shipping all need to be amortised and added as an (expensive) shipping option. It will be higher than surface mail costs, and will either meet or be a little less than EMS costs, which means 85% of our customers will disregard the option and choose the cheap one;)

Same here... but it's our fault for not paying extra for a different delivery method.  I didn't realize how long it would take to get from South Africa to the USA.

Mine shipped almost a month ago.  My tracking has been stuck on "Origin Post is Preparing Shipment" since Jan 9th.  Ordered on November 30th.

IMO, this looks like a good product but there are some logistic problems with shipping world wide.  You would benefit from distributors in the USA and Europe that can ship the product quickly to customers. 

Let me take a looksie for you - what's your order number?

Ordered my package in the beginning of December and still no product arriving, anyone get anything yet?