A few words on our stand-by and shipping processes.
The models come in and are then sorted. All paid orders are shipped, all holds are held. If we haven't been contacted by the customer, nothing is held.
During the shipping process, we call all no-show customers one last time. Usually it's not good news. There's a reason why they didn't contact us and we understand. But how terrible it would be if a customer just forgot, and missed getting his new models. We do everything we can to avoid that. But....
At first we have a good amount of models on the shelf after shipping. Then a week after shipping them out, we start to receive emails about the errors we made, A instead of B, 2 Rail in stead of 3 Rail, and it takes a week to 10 days to discover the errors and exchange these with customers and put the returned models back on the shelf. That's why we want to wait at least 2 -3 weeks after we ship models to contact Stand-by customers, so we are not selling someones purchased model by mistake.
Because we are making so many road names in each run, we can't make extras. They become very hard to sell and are very costly. So we ask that you reserve well in advance, and make sure it's a firm reservation. Have the money set asside. Then send in your payment early (A few weeks), so we have your invoice printed, ready to apply a UPS tag and slap on your box once they are sorted. If your preference it to "Wait until they are in...", you run the risk of a shortage hitting your order, a mis shipment affecting your order, a factory box mistake, any number of crazy things happen while we are trying to match invoices to boxes. Not only do we make mistakes, but Mrs. Wong in China, sometimes puts the wrong models in the box, or marks the labels wrong. We don't discover it until we sort and count each and every box. BTW: Mrs. Wong draws all the decals and painting and lettering diagrams, supervises packaging too. She is always multitasking. I never saw her complain, always a smile. But no English either, so communication was difficult. I try to tell these people how much we appreciate them. But if you say it too much, they want more money. Hahaha.
Back to early payments: So, it's best to just play it safe, and send in your payment or payment info a few weeks before the models arrive. We are not collecting interest on your money. It is a credit balance in your acccount with us. Business accounts have no interest at all. We are fully insured for the container, in case it falls into the drink. 110% cost is the amount of insurance. It hasn't happened yet, but it does happen. We have plenty of bank credit and if we need to use it, we can refund anyone's order that is lost. That's how I always run my business, in the black. Of course if we lost a project on the water at that stage, we would remake them.
Thanks for listening, and thank you all so much for your enthusiasm and support. We are now working very hard on the GP79 rerun, SD40-2, NYC H-10, Eagle Cars and so on. Have a great year. Keep in touch. In a week to 10 days we will contact any stand-by customers with what we have that matches their order.
Regards,
Scott Mann
