We’re working to provide better delivery estimates and stock updates

We’ve transitioned to a much better inventory system. This new system allows us to manage our inventory better and provide more accurate delivery estimates.

The old system only allowed us to provide a single estimate, even if an item was available from a location closer to you. This resulted in a delivery date estimate that was too long. On the flip side, if you lived in a remote area, and we had to ship from an alternate location due to stock, your delivery estimate might be far too generous.

We’re also working on providing expected arrival times for backordered items, giving you a better idea of when to expect your package.

As always, these are provided as estimates, and delivery dates can not be guaranteed until the package ships. Generally, this will be within 24-48 hours. One of our first goals is to shorten processing times, and we’ll update this blog when that happens.

However, we have already calculated those processing days in the delivery estimate. We will tweak them based on real-world data (and to our early customers, feedback on whether the date provided was correct would be fantastic!)

Improving stock counts

Of course, the most essential part of running any store is keeping track of inventory, and we are currently in the process of ensuring correct inventory for products that we might not physically carry in our warehouse.

This also affects your delivery time, as we must know what’s available on low-stock items. (As an aside, anything we carry that another supplier provides can be back-ordered and regularly replenished – we don’t want to have items that might be hard to get once back-ordered!)

In the meantime, we ask that if you are ordering something where you see an “only x left” message, the delivery date may not be accurate, as it might be backordered.

Again, this wouldn’t have been possible with our old system, so we’re spending the weekend transitioning the store over. This may result in items randomly disappearing occasionally as they are transitioned to the new system.

We have both running simultaneously, so this doesn’t affect the site’s operation.

We’ll update this post again when the process is complete.