TOPIC: Order Status and delivery date

Hi, I'd just like to know if there's a way to know at what point they are in the process of completing orders.

A list for instance that tells you how many persons will have theirs made before yours would have been nice honestly and some more updates on what's going on and how they're progressing with all of this.

do you mean something like this?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iYI8YaSq54IhgKSYYSsb2SxNo5EKcAC0jQvBB-lCTU4/edit#gid=577335520

originally created and posted by user: gcnywaldork
or are you looking for something different ?

I once suggested an oder number based "Saberqueue" post for the main site. However, I acknowledge that unless they had a way to automate the thing it would take WAY too much of someone's (possibly more than one someone's) time to do, and I would rather they focus on production.

Considering the hundreds of sabers that go in (orders) and out (shipped) weekly, no way to track that. Just know it's a LOT Hence the longer lead times. If you haven't gotten a status change email, you're in the queue.

The excel sheet is pretty cool. But yeah just tells me what i already know. I don't know (at all) when I'll get it.. like all of you I guess.

Would be nice if we just had more updates on when we can expect to receive them. I mean, they did say between February and March right?

I'm not really worried about it but.. damn am I looking forward to holding it

I'm going to weigh in here as someone who deals with eCommerce / Online Retail order management for a living. Just to give you all a little background, the company that I work for specializes in online order management for personal web stores for companies like SaberForge (SaberForge is NOT one of our clients, but I'm just using them as an example) who are their own company brand who fulfill their own orders. My company also specializes in translating orders from a larger online retailer, lets say Amazon, to their third party vendors warehouses for fulfillment.

Now that I've listed my credentials, let's discuss the topic of automation. Once an order exists in a shipping facility's internal order / inventory system it is actually quite simple to automate the creation of shipping labels. Major carriers such as UPS and FedEx have specifically designed software that allows for this if a shipping facility's internal system is not built to generate it's own shipping labels via a carrier's API.

However, the part where things can get a bit gritty is being able to easily import orders from an outside source (such as Etsy, Kickstarter, and IndieGogo) efficiently. Each and every outside company has their own way of managing order information, and different rules on whether or not they will integrate best on certain industry EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) standards. Some even disregard these standards all together. My company has had retailers only able to transmit orders to a warehouse via the body of an email instead of a usable file format, but it is possible to translate that email body into a readable order at the warehouse with the right technical setup but this can be very daunting and expensive to do in house requiring the employment of a specific team just to manage that one area of the company. The main problem you run into with Kickstarter and IndieGogo is that they do not capture the customized details of each perk type at the time that the backer pledges their order. They see each perk as a single product with no variations. This is why we all received an email from Saberforge after the fact asking us to fill in a form with our custom parts lists.

I'm assuming some poor soul at SaberForge (most likely Melissa...) is then manually processing each and every one of the thousands of emails containing parts lists into some type of order format that is usable by sabersmiths and people packing each order. Because of this process, I don't see how they could have had an overview of the total number of parts with varying finishes that they needed from the very beginning, which could translate to trouble with available inventory and explain why they need to jump around in the order queue so that things end up shipping out at what seems to be a random way and making it difficult to gauge when a particular person's order will be ready if they need to manufacture / order more parts.

Of course, this is all speculation since I have not spoken to anyone directly at SaberForge about this, but it's just my two cents based on what I know about the eCommerce / Online Retail industry.

Sorry if this takes us off topic, but hope the information is useful somehow...

@gcnywaldork, a very precise and comprehensive explanation and demonstration of your credentials. Quite perceptive and plausible even if as speculation. Thank You. It certainly highlights with emphasis on Melissa's role (allegedly) enduring the painful task of manual cross reference.

Yes, unfortunately there does not seem to be any 100% consistency in how they are doing it. I believe they are doing Kickstater first then Indigogo. It also seems that they are starting with lower tiers first. Not backer number.

Granted, its been a week since I have been online and I haven't combed all the forums yet today but last I heard campion level and even some legendary were going out. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I am part of the Kickstater top tier and I havent heard anything yet, so please let me know if anyone has heard anything else or if Indigogo supporters have started receiving their sabers. If so, I may need to reach out to SF personally to get some answers. I have avoided this up til now as I am sure they get flooded with many anxiously waiting supporters each week.

Darth Vexing wrote:
I don't know about WAY too much time, as a simple status board would probably take a couple hours. Thanks again gcnywaldork for the excel sheet! And she did it in her spare time working backwards through Indigogo posts.

Even if they grouped people together like 'Kickstarter $500-1000 supporters complete and being shipped' and 'Indigogo supporters $0-500 being built now - goal complete in 2 weeks' would be helpful.

We are undergoing a mult-imillion dollar hospital renovation effecting thousands of people and we send out weekly updates and an expected timeline thru December of this year.

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah you do speak sense waldork..

If I was them I would have hired a junior programmer to go through emails and extract info using the email + part info then create a DB using that maybe with MySQL. Pretty simple.

Anyways, let's just be patient.

Yeah, received this email. Thanks Saber Forge for the update! *thumbs up*