Hi @JosephBrown we haven’t decided yet.
Any thoughts on Makerfare NY?
We’ll see how things go with speaking at MakerCon Bay Area and hosting the Inventables party Saturday night.
You seriously went all the way to California just to get Chicago-style pizza? 
(hope you all enjoy your party!)
I’m heading to Makers Faire on sunday. I’ll have to find you guys!
Got my shipping info today(ordered 3/29/15). Still hasn’t shown up on UPS.com yet. Hoping for 1 day delivery to Houston so I can work on this weekend but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Seems there time estimates were pretty spot on.
Mine took 7 and 9 days to Midland TX since UPS lost 2 boxes for a couple of days,but I did get everything yesterday.
So, I ordered my X-Carve on April 26. I’m a little bummed because I misunderstood the process of how these kits were going to be ordered, assembled and shipped.
See, back in March I put a Shapeoko2 in my cart and left it overnight to think about it. When I woke up and decided to pull the trigger, I found that I could no longer order it. That was the day Shapeoko went away, and the next day the X-Carve page went live.
What I thought was that all the parts were already in-house when the page went live, and during the 2 months leading up to the launch, the staff would be assembling the kits, and then do a massive shipping dump on the 30th to fulfill the pre-orders.
I didn’t pre-order despite having the money, because honestly, I’ve never done business with Inventables before, and after the licensing weirdness with the Shapeoko, I wasn’t confident giving them over a thousand dollars to hold onto for 2 months.
I even emailed customer service about it, asking if there would be kits available after the 30th or if they would all go to pre-orders, and got “We anticipate on having the X-Carve in stock on after after April 30th” as a reply.
I assumed that meant the X-Carve would be available immediately to purchase at that time but I was wrong.
So, I’m bummed that in the end Inventables will have my thousand dollars for a month or 2 anyway, and I have to just suck it up and hope things go well in the mean time. I’m happy with the transparency of the process, and it seems like things are going well. But, when I get emails about all this other stuff the company is doing, I get all impetuous, like "Why are they putting out other products and going to MakerFaire, when they’ve got hundreds of X-Carve kits (mine among them) that are already paid for and waiting to ship out? I know that’s not really fair, but it’s an emotional response.
Do we have this update?
As of the close of business today we are up to March 30th with the exception of 3 orders.
In response to @mike we did not get a booth at MakerFaire this year. We only sent 2 people myself and Michael our marketing person. Our involvement has no impact on shipping times. We chose not to get a booth because we wanted the team focused on shipping.
The email you got from Customer Success was accurate. We do have all the parts in house and we are shipping as fast as possible. I have also authorized overtime hours and some of our staff including me has come in on the weekend to work on kitting, picking, or packing orders.
The X-Controller also had no impact on shipping time. Our engineering team finished everything with X-Carve before working on the X-Controller. The warehouse team is not involved in the design and sourcing part of X-Controller.
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Accurate, but misleading.
For the sake of transparency, here’s what I sent:
I’m concerned about the very long lead time though. April 30 is a long time to wait, and if I purchase today, that’s almost 2 months between payment and shipping.
My question is: Do you anticipate selling out of your first run of X-Carve kits? I’d like to wait to purchase one until a little closer to the ship time, but if there won’t be any available by then it would be a huge bummer. Thanks a lot!
And I got back:
We anticipate on having the X-Carve in stock on after after April 30th, although I cannot make a guarantee.
I made clear that my concern was the 2 months of lead time between paying for the thing and shipping the thing. I don’t feel like it was clearly explained to me that this situation was unavoidable, that the pre-orders would go out first and that the longer you wait the longer it will take to ship.
I appreciate that you guys are all working very hard on getting these out the door. I’m not mad about it, and I understand this stuff takes time and effort and it seems like everyone is doing a great job. I just feel like if I knew back in March that no matter what I’d have to wait a month between clicking “buy” and getting a ship date, I’d have ordered right away instead of waiting, and I’d have my X-Carve now.
Mike,
Until I started supporting kickstarter projects I wouldn’t have thought of preordering months in advance either, but it does seem to be the way nich products are going these days. I have yet to place an order. And at first that was for the same concern as you, it’s a lot of money to hand over to somebody and hope you get a product in a few months. But as I’ve hung around here more, that is far less a concern for me. I still have a few other things holding me back, but the big one is I’m on the road right now, and need a few days back home to get my purchase sorted out.
As I read the email response you got I can see both sides. Reading it I never got the impression they intentionally mislead you, just that they were looking at it from what they knew was happening, and you were looking at it from a differant viewpoint. Knowing what most companies do, it would never of occurred to me that the company would build all the packages ahead of time, and ship at once, that’s a warehouse nightmare. Apple is one of the few that can get away with it, and they still run out of popular items quick, before supply meats demand.
And that’s what looks like is happening here, supply looks like it will eventually meet demand. Wait another month to place your order, and you will probably have far less of a wait between order and fulfillment.
Just my take,
Steven
@mike it was not our intention to mislead you. I will talk to the person that handled your case next week to make sure they understand the implication of their answer so this kind of thing doesn’t happen moving forward. We were getting hundreds of inquiries a day and we only have 4 Customer Success people so they might have felt the stress and we’re trying to go too fast and didn’t fully process that while they gave you a fast accurate answer it did not provide enough context for the real question you were concerned about. I’m sorry about that.
@StevenSchmelling is correct we are currently shipping more units per day than we are selling so there will be a point in the future where we are able to ship an X-Carve unit the same day it is purchased. X-Carve is a bit more complex to do this with than our past products because every X-Carve order is unique due to the configurator on the website.
3 Likes
@mike also to be fair to our Customer Success person that responded to you, as a company we didn’t expect to sell this many this fast. The tremendous response to X-Carve has been humbling.
Our operations team does not like having a backlog. Our warehouse system is designed for same day shipping and they desperately want to get back to that as soon as possible.
2 Likes
Thanks for all your transparency and quick responses, Zach. I’m buoyed by this level of service, and if not for that my confidence would most certainly be lower than it is.
Again, I appreciate everything that you and your team is doing to get these kits out to all of us eager makers and I just wish I had understood better about the nature of how these kits were going to come together from the start.
Just checking to see if I missed the update. I’m also just curious if we are still on schedule.
I think he replied as part of a reply to something else, up about 6 or 7 replies from this reply.
On Friday they shipped all but 3 orders placed on the 30th of March. So they are just slightly (3 orders) behind what the initial projection was in the blog.
Mine is 1 of the 3 that didn’t get shipped of the March 30 orders, 
looking forward to shipping email. Still need to clean off the industrial desk where it is going.
That’s great news (well for the majority, maybe not so much for one of the three)
Rick
Hey @sisco yea we are 3 orders behind we hope to catch up next week and hopefully pull ahead!