WTF. Where's My Warbot?

As you can imagine, there are many people anxious to receive their order of Steel Core and the manufacturer has indeed exceeded expectations and delivered the product to Fans Project Core much earlier than the release date of July 31st. It is usually typical for most manufacturers not to ship their product until after their official release date.

But alas, despite our efforts, it has still left several customers without Steel Cores for one reason or another. And as you can imagine the inbox has been slammed with emails simply asking... "other people have gotten it, where's mine?" and other equally popular questions. We have taken every effort to answer these questions... while building out features for our next exciting website announcement... while demanding more exclusives from the manufacturer... while working on getting more steel core's announced so that members that didn't have a chance will still get a chance to get one... while trying to ship the final handful of orders to customers who have already reserved a Steel Core... while trying to... (deeeeeep breath)... you get the idea - there are a billion things we are trying to do for the fans of FPC! And we are excited, but trying to smooth things out on all fronts.

We are also happy to assure those of you who only care about where your Steel Core order is that we are almost done shipping the last orders and we can all clap and be happy together soon!

So in an attempt to answer some questions in mass... here are some FAQ's that we have seen over the past few weeks of delivery:

1) What's the status of my order?, My friend just got their order, is mine coming soon?, I hear a lot of people are getting their Steel Core orders, is mine coming soon?

We are shipping orders in priority of order number, but cannot guarantee that it arrives in the order in which we shipped or guarantee when specific order numbers will be shipped. This is why we have chosen to start our shipping nearly 2 weeks before the release date in hopes to get packages out as fast as possible and that customers receive their orders with as little wait as possible.

You can check the status of your order in your account under your order section (rather than sending us an email, as we do the same thing to check status on our side - Pending means it hasn't shipped, completed means it has). We're happy to do it, but would love to continue to focus on getting other exciting things on the site done for you.

2) I was one of the first to pre-order on your site, yet people that have ordered after me received their item first?

How fans receive their products is some what outside of our control. For example. even though we aim to send out all of our orders in priority of order number, some orders are closer to the origin of the shipping, meaning that you could have a later order number and still receive your product first. Also, we ship our orders in batches, so when it is picked up, there is no guarantee that the shipper processes in the same order we did.
 

3) I pre-ordered my Steel Core with you in advance and recently attendees of TFCON were able to purchase them at the show. This does not seem fair, why did I pre-order if I could just pick it up at the show?

TFcon was a special event and provided a chance to sell cancelled orders and extra stock we had for Steel Core but was completely not planned and was a last minute surprise to us. People that bought at the con had to pay more for the figure, pay the price of admission and hope that they were 1 of few people to get in line at our booth to purchase the very limited offering (under 50pcs were sold). This is something that online pre-order members did not need to do. You could have waited for tfcon, but there would have been no guarantee that you would receive a figure and you would have had to pay more. As a pre-ordered member, you are guaranteed a figure at the member price.

4) ...I'm curious why I paid for expedited shipping, if other people are getting their orders first?

We do not offer expedited shipping as an option. There was never an option for expedited shipping ever offered. The 3 options were Flat Rate (USPS Priority Mail in USA and International, Canada Post Expedited in Canada), USPS First Class and UPS Ground. We worked very hard to work out the flat rate option to be the most affordable and fastest option for customers. However, based on early feedback, some customers don't want to have only 1 choice of shipping service, as USPS isn't prefered by everybody. UPS Ground costed more as an option, but it was put there to allow another choice for those who wanted it, not as an expedited service. In most cases, nothing is faster than the flat rate option that we offered.

5) Why were orders not all packed ahead of time and shipped on the release date all at once?

There are many reasons that made that process very hard to do. One of the main reasons that we did not do this however is because we ship from different shipping companies and each have different packaging requirements for the shipping prices we offered. Being that it was our very first fulfillment with our shipper, we had snags in receiving the proper packing materials. Rather than make everyone wait, we started shipping in batches according to order priority for the amount of proper supplies we had. We started shipping early to make sure that this error would not cost us more time after the release date. In future, we are aiming to have a more orders batched per shipment making less of a lag between the first orders and last ones.