Glen, I’m not Dan, (he’s a guy, it’s difficult to confuse the two of us), but I sincerely hope you don’t give up on it.
It’s not fair that the International folk have to wait so much longer than anyone else, but I firmly believe it is still due to logistics, and not any reason other than that. There isn’t anything they can do other than make sure everything is working as well as they can get it before they start shipping these things out overseas. Look at how much trouble they are still having with domestic shipments…they can’t afford to have that happen with the international shipments. They can’t be shipping replacement units internationally the way they are having to do here, the cost would be punitive.
On the plus side, for you guys, you are going to get a machine that is rock solid when you get it, and won’t have to struggle through the occasional downtimes and blips that we are seeing now. The software will be tweaked a lot further along than it is now. No alignment issues. No hang-ups in processing. (Or a lot fewer…no one can say none without sounding like an idiot.)
The last folks to get the machines will get machines that have a lot of the bugs worked out, and more capabilities than these see. I know it’s not much to hang on to, but your learning curve is going to be a lot easier than ours was. You’ll probably get up to speed quicker than some of the folks receiving them now.
Anyway, the situation totally sux, I know it, you know it, they know it. And I know they feel bad about it. They just can’t give out information they don’t have.
And I see @dan is replying as well, so just ignore this. (But hang in there.)
Indeed, it’s frustrating that you spend, more, and it costs more to serve you (we make significantly less money from each international order), yet all that extra spending from both of us still results in service that’s not as good as what we can do for domestic customers.
We forecast them separately, based on different data.
I’m replying from my phone en route to a flight - apologies; with thousands of posts to read, I sometimes miss one, particularly when I’m not at my desk.
Part of my job for a medical device company is making sure we have testing performed for various certifications. As our devices run on electricity and have WiFi we have to meet the same or similar standards as glowforge (plus others, but no lasers.) One mistake, one oversight, and timelines are pushed back weeks and months on a country by country basis.
I have no idea if this is affecting glowforge, but currently all of the auditing companies (TUV, BSI, etc…) are flooded with work certifying US medical device companies to a new standard that combines the US, Brazil and some other countries. These firms audit non-medical device companies, and undoubtedly have auditors not trained for this new standard, but they have no room in their schedules right now if you need an audit to renew, or become certified to, a standard. I’m just pointing out that in compliance, there can be factors beyond your control that impact your business and aren’t generally obvious.
I am in the US and I have my unit, but it is not NRTL certified. It is probably the same machine that will eventually ship to Europe, but it never will be from a certifications standpoint. It is a decision we are allowed to make, that most non-US buyers aren’t.
You’re definitely right about that. Even with announcements, it generally got pretty ugly every time it happened. Most of the time, the company decided not to detail reasons for delay and they waited until almost the last minute to publicly recognize they were going to slip.
That’s why I think the personalized date that moves as the data is updated is an improvement over waiting until they’ve got a publicly consumable statement that doesn’t tell you what you want to know anyway.
Neither way removes the frustration, I think. It’s frustrating, no question. I understand that boat, I’ve been in it.
I think part of the disheartening thing about seeing the date move out for me was the worry that there would always be something coming up and I’d never get a laser cutter.
I know some folks who cancelled and said call me back when you’re current on your order book. Obvious problem with that approach is that you lose the discount.
Hi @dan,
As we are now entering significantly into 2018 calendar year before international orders are going to be received by end users - can you please take a look at extending the founders offer of “10% discount on Proofgrade materials and in the Design catalog through the end of 2018.”.
Cheers,
Tim
To me, this one month delay appears as another buy some extra time but we don’t know exactly when we can deliver. It looks like the previous 6 month delays earlier. I don’t believe it’s because of a specific setback but more related to their decision to put all their resources in the domestic orders.
I’d love to laser as soon as possible so every delay is a disappointment but I understand and wait because their is no good alternative for me and think Dan and his team are working very hard to deliver an outstanding product. It’s difficult to decide what I would like to hear. A reliable forecast or the the message just wait at this moment we can’t say anything reliable because it doesn’t have our priority yet.
Another international buyer here, ordered on day 17 of the campaign and just got moved back another 6 weeks for delivery to Holland. Going from FEB 12 to MAR 27…woohooo almost can’t hold my tears.
And just to make things even more complicated…@dan what will happen on this magic date:
A. We will receive THE mail (and have to wait another 6 weeks or more for delivery)
B. The GF ships on this date towards my destination from the factory
C. This is the estimated delivery date at my doorstep (doubt this one…but you can’t tell me I can’t dream…).
If I somehow missed this specific piece of information I’m sorry, but I cannot find it anywhere.
I feel year 3 coming up…
Still in the boat, even though it’s rocking like a madmen. Let’s all hang on, I see a tropical island on the horizon.
"We continue to move forward on both international and air filter as well. It’s a little harder to forecast when shipping will begin, but whenever we have a breakthrough or setback we update our individualized shipping forecast at glowforge.com/account."
Sigh
On another front, the person I referred has his Glowforge (Yay!) and I got my $125 referral credit…
“free shipping is available to all customers as of right now, but we only service the US. We haven’t announced shipping prices for international customers as we haven’t launched the shop for international deliveries yet.”
Sigh
But that’s okay because I can transfer that into $100. I just need to fill out a form…
“Please enter your US Mobile Number here”
I’m not sure I have the energy or will to even sign anymore.
I have dealt with US-centric businesses before. No one does this on purpose. It’s a by product of being from one of the largest countries in the world. But can I suggest that Glowforge staff just ask themselves one question each time a new product/process is formed?
“How does this affect international customers?”
You will save yourself so much time if this is mentioned at a staff meeting, occasionally checked by managers etc. So much of this stuff is in the detail like not offering ‘Free Shipping’ to customers who not only will not get free shipping but currently can’t be shipped to at all. If the person that wrote that email just had in their back on their minds, “How does this affect international customers?”, then support would not have had to deal with my querying email or any of the others that other customers will send.
There may be 400m potential customers in the USA but there are over 6.6 billion outside it. Yes there are challenges to be faced to service those customers but not considering us from the outset is demeaning, undermining and pompous. And I know that these are things that you do not want to be.
Sorry for being ‘ranty’, but I really am losing patience.
For US customers the magic date is the date you receive your email. The 6 week window until actual delivery starts when you respond to the email saying, please ship my unit. Some people get their unit pretty quickly while others wait the full six weeks. Most seem to wait 2-4 weeks. Mine was in my house 3 weeks to the day I responded to the email (1 week spent in transit.)
Canada here, I fell backwards a month too. Now June.
Considering shipping time I just lost my ability to use it for HOPE (http://hopehelps.com/) this year with that extra month delay.
Is there a reasonable chance the delivery date may go forward or are likely to only see it slide back due to surprises? Optimisim in delivery dates often reports best cases, it’s fine if that’s the reporting. I’d just like to know.
Obviously only the company can answer your question. Still, historically an answer other than “it’s possible” is not likely.
My two cents… There have been slips and accelerations in the estimated dates. Domestic purchasers have seen dates moved up by weeks. These are probably a result of parts availability and/or increases in manufacturing throughput. However the recent slide of a month for International purchases is more likely the result of estimates for when certifications, shipping changes, or country specific requirements could be satisfied. I think the truth is that if there are more slides you will see them before you see any significant accelerations.
Can you do the shipping to a US location and then bring it across the boarder? You might be able to jump up several months by doing that. I would think that would be worth even a long drive to do. Then you should have it in plenty of time.
This is a common problem for US companies; most are unable to understand it this way.
When you DO see a US company that thinks outside their own borders then it is amazing how high the ratio of success vs. failure is.
They were (are) a company with a handful of employees and a nice chunk of financing behind them. It would be very easy to make the argument that they were naive, if not outright idiotic, to both attempt to bring the glowforge to market as promised and offer it for sale in every non-embargoed country in the world. Better to have worried about the hardware and software for the US (and maybe Canada) and then once it was done roll it out to the rest of the world. Why complicate a very difficult task with a global compliance and distribution headache? Be successful first and then conquer the world. If they had gone that route they could have signed-up local distributors. That would have allowed shipping in containers to the destination geography with local repair facilities. Instead they have eye-watering shipping costs and iirc with the exception of out of box failures, non-US customers who have to pay eye-watering shipping if they need to use their warranty. None of this doesn’t mean a non-US customer shouldn’t be upset: glowforge made promises they didn’t keep and are pushing back your dates. But to me, it is perplexing why they went the global route from the start instead of a staged roll out.
Yup, as an International i could not agree more with all you wrote.
There are a number of cool tools/items that are USA-only… would love to get them but since they refuse to offer the OS option i wont buy them. As i mentioned in another thread, here in Australia we have enough problems with crappy Chinese products flooding the market and offering no warranty to bother volunteering to take on the risk.
The only reason i bought in was because it was offered for OS sale and i felt it was safe to assume that this meant SOMEONE had actually sat down and thought about all this entails.
All I can do is answer the questions that I know the answer to.