This. ^^ It's been 6 months of crickets with not so much of a post, tweet, or message on FB - I don't think I'll be coming back which is a shame after patronizing CP for almost a decade.
A quick look through a few pages of his site shows nothing from WFC: Siege past wave 1, and only six non-sold-out preorders, which have been there quite a while (and two in stock that have not moved off of the preorder page). At this point, I am wondering whether word of mouth or inability to get stock will prove the greater hurdle. If Target can't get new toys in stock, what chance does a one-man operation have? (As I mentioned once before, I have encountered no problems with buying stuff from Orson...other than one of the UW combiners that had flaws with two of the figures and one of the HFG, for which he quickly provided replacements from another set. I really hope he pulls through and makes a comeback.)
BBB came back to me and said they'll be removing my complaint from their file. And that concludes my history with CP.
CP was the first dealer I bought from at my first TFCon, and I suppose the store that got me back into the game. From the looks of it, it seems like it'll be closing shop. No new pre-orders, dwindling stock, etc.
So the good news...got shipping notice for XTB Neptune. Really surprised about that given he's just showing up to retailers and CP usually last to get stuff. The bad news, I had him on stasis pod with 2 other figures that have been in stock a while now yet those are not shipped yet. I had them all in stasis pod so that when all are in stock I can ship them out together for free shipping. Really baffling why the Neptune was shipped already without the other 2. I messaged CP. Hopefully will get some sort of response.
I don't think he is getting any new stock and I do believe he will finish out previous orders and back orders. Sounds like he is going to take a break from the store once everything is fulfilled. I have FT Blitzwing still remaining but who knows when that will be out.
Honestly, the margins are the toughest part for a small shop w 3P products. Unless you have enough capital saved up to jumpstart the business, a strong work ethic, and a long time horizon, there's a very good chance it will fail within a couple years. Seen quite a few come and go in the short four years I've been in this scene.
I believe he has/had a storefront. Got to pay overhead costs before he can get paid. When business is slow and no new TFs coming out, money flies away unless you have a big diversity in products.
It’s really easy to fail when you think about it. No advantage over customers. No real savings in stock. Legitimate business storefront costs. All of the risk and none of the reward. If these companies were smart they would advertise through the main sites that attract us and create their own distribution channel and kill off the stores. They could prefund projects. Too late now but it would have worked a few years ago. What if your stores were FT, XTB, MMC etc all linked to this site. They would have cared a lot more about marketing. Toyworld started to do this before abandoning it and imploding into Zeta. All of these companies lost a lot of revenue there.
You need a lot of capital to run a physical storefront that exists exclusively off of TF. You can use the store to act as your warehouse for your inventory, but storefront floor space is much more expensive than warehouse space. Unless you're it in a city of collectors, and presuming you are accessible to the collectors in the city (e.g. not way out in the burbs or in an area of town that has excellent transit options), foot traffic isn't driving your sales. It's a tough business. I can't imagine margins are all that huge.
True, though it's pretty straightforward to announce pricing, have retailers place their orders with you, and ship a few pallets to a handful of global destinations. That much can be done with very little overhead and personnel. Once you start allowing individual customers to buy direct, you increase time and monetary costs significantly. If they allow retailers to continue to bear the burden of individual customer sales & shipping & be invested in marketing & customer service for their products, but do a better job of forward deploying spare parts to their main retail partners that would reduce what is probably the only drag on their current business model (after-sale support) and they would quickly gain a better rep with both retailers and consumers. Just like they often supply the promotional photos of their products, they could be supplying spare screws and replacement parts proactively.
Agree with your points but it all comes down to margin. Taobao is making money and they are far cheaper so you have even another layer of the price caused by middlemen injected in there. If you are Maketoys you already sell and ship through your website. The books might look different if all of your sales came through there rather than retailing it off for around half the price. These are boxed and shipped at the factory. That’s 90% of the work. Computerized creation of 2000 vs 100 shipping labels is what we are talking about here for another $50 a figure. Having one board member that is your official 598 type reviewer and markets your 3 figures a year for free figures seems awful damn cheap. After sales care is about the same. The language barrier and traditional sales channels seems to be the main drivers for the outdated model. The companies still have to do everything else anyway. What magic cost did they save? It seems lazy. I may have gone that way the first time out of execution risks but that lost margin would have made me solve that problem. Upfronting preorders with half down and the rest when ready to ship or lose deposit would make people very serious about following through. When their rep was good this could have worked. Hell it could really work well now for FT. I would do it.
This is exactly what happened to me - he shipped 1 item and not the rest in my stasis pod, and I've never been able to get him to respond to get it rectified so I simply got my money back through my credit card company and bought it somewhere else. Hopefully you have better luck!
Same boat. Been paid for quite some time now and I'm worried about how that whole mess will transpire.
I don't see that as a viable situation with as long as it takes 3rd party product to see release. I sure as shit ain't putting up half the money for a product that's likely not going to be released for another year or two...not when I only have 6 months of protection on my purchase. That's how you wind up with people in shitty situations like what this thread was about.
Unfortunately my current orders were placed using store credit that I received from canceling previous orders. So I don't think credit card company would help. One of the figure (Crackup) still shows in stock so I don't know why he can't send that out too. Toro is out of stock but if he inventoried stasis pod orders correctly then one should have been set aside for me because it was in stock at one point.
I have a stasis pod with 3 items: 2 still in-stock and 1 since sold out (Hoodlum). I haven't gotten a peep out of him after months of polite reminders. Either he oversold the out-of-stock items (and did not set them aside) or he just doesn't give a damn and can't be bothered to ship out our stasis pods. There are a few posts here about some people finally getting some of their orders and I'm happy for them, but I wonder what the numbers are of customers still waiting to be made whole. I'm out about $150 and that's from old store credit originally from the ancient Berserk preorder, so I have no protection from my credit card company. My experience with the "little guys" has not been great: Ace Toys, Premium Collectibles, GCI, now Captured Prey. It really grates on me when people still describe Orson as a "great guy" or "doing his best". This is not the behavior of a great guy. If you don't have the merchandise or the cash then take out a loan, pay back your customers, and let everyone move on with their lives.