We often get a lot of emails requesting to preorder products that may be coming into stock so we thought we would share some thoughts on why we don't do preorders in general.

We occasionally do preorders in order to compete in a fast moving market and to appease customers.

As per our shipping information, we like to have a reputation, that if an item can be added to the cart, and you place it by 1pm, it will ship same day, and most likely arrive the next day.

To sum it up, Pre Orders in our hobby is a massive admin nightmare and leads to many disappointed and frustrated customers.

  1. Pre Order Cancelling
    Due to the nature of our industry, if we take a preorder, and another store gets stock even a day before us, customers call up and cancel, then order from the other store. I even challenged a customer recently about this and he said straight up, yep, that would be me.
    This just means a lot more processing, cancelling orders, refunding for a sale we don't get to have and increases costs all around.
  2. Combining orders / Splitting Orders
    With pre-orders, most customers would add other items to their cart, and there is no simple solution for allowing the customer to split shipments and pay extra postage if they don't want to wait for the rest of the order. Customers usually think its ok to wait and will place the order, then when the preorder gets delayed, sometimes 2-3 times, they want it split and does not play nice with CMS and shipping systems.
  3. Many emails and phone calls
    Every pre-order taken, it means one more customer calling and emailing regularly when it will arrive and when it will ship. Most of the time we only know 2-3 days beforehand when items are arriving so all we can provide is disappointing news time and time again while taking up loads of staff time with phone calls and emails.
  4. Customers get upset
    Extending on the above, when we get a lead time from a manufacturer and they delay it 2-3 times and we have your money, you get upset. Its not our fault and completely out of our hands but the customer places the problem/fault with the business they handed over the money to, and looks bad on our brand, which we don't want.
  5. Paypal, Shopify and other payment processing providers no longer refund us the fees they charge us when we do a refund. This means we can actually lose alot of money when someone cancels large preorders.
  6. Some products fail and we never see them
    There has been a few examples of hyped FPV products that are coming, websites take orders, and then the product fails or cant be manufactured for various reasons and the whole thing is a flop. This leads to massive refunds and an accounting admin mess on top of point 3 and 4.

If you are a customer and have been sent here via an email thank you for understanding and our reasonings behind no pre-orders.

We aim to get products in as fast as possible and have enough stock for all and kindly ask you to sign up for product notifications on the product pages instead of asking us if you can pre-order =)

Thankyou, The PhaserFPV Team