Quote:
Originally Posted by Madigan
Ryan why the shipping cost to argentina and adjacent countries is so expensive (XPO International Parcel $75.00), compared to australia (MSI International Parcel $43.00) or finland (XPO International Parcel $40.00)?
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I imagine this is to do with us not sending many packages there historically and therefore not having enough data to do a decent analysis of costs. I'll see what our nearest quote was, and try to determine how we got to $75. Worst case scenario, if you ever do really want something but the shipping seems out of line, I'd be willing to push through an authorization to refund you the overage from whatever our actual costs were, and maybe that would result in a better understanding of rates to that area for everyone....
Skip the rest of this answer unless you're bizarrely interested in knowing a lot more about how we calculate shipping.
As an aside, we're [obviously] not calculating rates in real-time. We have two spreadsheets with about 2100 lines in one and 800 or so in the other that we update with a complicated series of formulas for calculating shipping fees to various countries/regions. This is based off of ever-changing rates we get charged and evolving comparisons of shipping charged to you guys vs. shipping fees we pay. You may see this as horrendously over-complicated, and you'd be right, but this is borne out of a necessity to handle a bunch of different use cases, for instance:
* Most things are based on weight and are therefore straightforward.
* Lithographs are very lightweight, but require very specialized and expensive shipping arrangements.
* But shipping three lithographs is essentially the same price as shipping one, so those calculations can't be just additive.
* Most anything else you order won't be able to be combined with a lithograph, so that means multiple shipments, and therefore a bit more complexity in actual shipping costs.
* Repeat for a ton of other indivudally specific edge cases.
* Oh, and every general and specific rule needs to be handled differently for a great deal of countries and/or regions.
* Some of which require duties to be paid, otherwise the package is held up or returned. Which duties are sometimes different for different items
within the same country.
* This list actually goes on....
And all of those rules and overrides need to be distilled into formulas and rows in those spreadsheets, which are then tweaked and re-imported into the system, and then some new thing comes along that we have to figure out (in this case, now everyone that orders this one thing will end up getting two shipments of vastly different dimensions and weights that will go out at different times and probably at different speeds).
Needless to say, this is zero fun, and after all of this work and head-banging-on-walls we're still stuck charging more than we'd like to ask customers to pay just to cover costs. All of which is to say, yes, our shipping rates suck, but we're doing as much as we can to make them suck just as much less as possible, and we're sorry.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MortalMonday
Looks like they're already shifting around stock. New remaining stock figures show that they added standalone stock and PS3 stock, and reduced PC stock. It also shows that there is more overall stock available now than there was earlier in the day.
Standalone: 587
Xbox: 926
PS3: 690
PC: 495
Total remaining stock: 2,699
Maybe the inventory system isn't totally reliable?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SwiftDeath
It certainly is possible for it to be unreliable
But it is also just as likely that people are cancelling orders changing orders etc.
Would like a clarification on it if at all possible though
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Yeah, I got ahold of our production manager to move some inventory around since the Add-On version is winning. She made a mistake in the math, but was mad at me for hitting her up on a Sunday so she said it would be fine until the morning when we could get a more accurate look at sales numbers and then fix it for good. Stand by....