How to do preorders?
guildofblades:
Well, I don't have a handy reference, but if you claim to ship via the post office or you accept money via post of use the post office for the solicitation of your pre order in any fashion, I believe you are expected to ship your items within 30 days of taking the money.
Paypal has a consumer settlement period of 45 days. After that time period of the consumer gets screwed and they didn't raise a challenge, they have lost most of their recourse. And I think most consumer credit cards have a reasonable dispute period of 60 days. So if you take payment and do not ship and deliver in those time frames, you have eliminated most fair recourse options from your customers and I suspect many won't like that.
Many of the wargame manufacturers who do pre order deals usually take your pre order and credit card info and have a form either signed on paper or an online form that gives you the right to charge the card in some timeframe around the time the product will be manufactured/shipped. So pre orders might be collected for months (or in a few cases, I've heard pre orders collected for years), but you wouldn't actually charge the cards until you've collected your target pre order goals and its time to print and ship the item.
We don't like the liability of keeping customer financial data around, as such, so we collect pre orders via e-mail or by form submit, but its all just stored via e-mail on our end. When we're ready to move forward, we then give customers an online form to pay for the pre order deal or now that we have a CC terminal, we can take pre orders via phone also. But we would never charge on those until we are just a week or two away from actually shipping. Folks that have "pre ordered" then failed to follow through on pre orders have simply gone onto a no pre order list, where we will not accept or honor pre orders from those persons in the future. They thusly do not get counted as part of our pre order numbers.
Our longest game in pre orders has been Empires of History: WWII. Its been in pre orders for about 6 years. The maps are finally done, its going through play tests write now and I am laying out the nation sheets and prettying up the game rules presentation. I think we have about 450 pre orders. Traditionally we clear about 70 percent of pre orders. Though this one has been in pre order for so long, I think 50% will be more likely in this case. We're getting ready to print the box wrap shortly and should be releasing this title in about 6 weeks. That means in about 4 weeks we'll be contacting everyone who pre ordered and offering them an opportunity to purchase on the pre order deal.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
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