Thank you all for your patience with this and I apologize for the radio silence for the past few days. I’ll do my best to reply to everyone here in order of their message. There’s lots of information below regarding lots of different issues.
TL:DR - I found an error late last week with about 600 orders, then I found another issue with about 150 order’s addresses. We got those fixed and orders will be submitted tomorrow morning. The timeline I posted 5 days ago is pretty much the same, but instead of things starting on Friday, it’s starting tomorrow, so add a couple days to that timeline. Once your order ships, you’ll get an email with that tracking information.
@lbt - Thanks for the feedback. I’ve relayed that to our ops team and they’re aware of what happened. Our ERP system, Netsuite, has a few different invoice options and we normally send a paid invoice like you described, but since the pre-order store orders were loaded in separately (and not placed through our retail/wholesale store) they defaulted to the invoices that had the payment instructions. We’re aware of this, have contacted anyone that’s paid twice, and gotten them taken care of.
@Mjones and @RWB - Like I mentioned before, your position in the queue is determined by the date you originally placed your order. That’s still the case!
@TheChrisBerry - I totally understand where you’re coming from and I agree that our optics/communication hasn’t been stellar with this. I’m working on correcting that and trying to make sure everyone has the most up-to-date information that I have. I assure you that we’re working on getting these orders out as soon as we can and I promise they won’t be obsolete when you get them.
@pabigot - I noticed that there’ve been many comments (and support tickets) about shipping addresses not being correct so I dug in here a little bit and I found, what I believe to be the problem. When we emailed everyone at the end of September about orders going out and to make sure your address/CC were correct, it had a link to the “my-order” page, which was where you could see your order details and make changes to your orders.
When we locked down orders on October 8th, the “Edit” options were still live for Credit Cards and for Addresses. It was intentional for Credit Cards, but the “Edit” option for addresses was supposed to be turned off, but it never happened. This allowed anyone who wanted/needed to update their address (which is great), but it never alerted or updated us (which is bad). Since we’ve been working off the list from the 8th (to verify addresses, credit cards, etc), anyone who’s updated their addresses between the 8th and about an hour ago wasn’t updated in our system. So that’s why a number of people have reported seeing discrepancies between their my-order page and what was on their invoice. Luckily, I caught this before many of the orders were submitted to be shipped and fixed appropriately. If your order shipped out and it went to the wrong address, please submit a ticket at our support site.
@Moors7 - Thanks for your support and help over the last few years!
@LloydChristmas - Orders placed over the summer are towards the end of the preorders. They’re likely to go out in about 10-12 days but the Thanksgiving holiday may push that a bit.
@JackANSI - I get where you’re coming from. We’ve learned a lot from this preorder and we’re going to take those learnings and try to improve going forward. You’re right, a meaningful amount of preorders didn’t go out in October like we planned, only a couple hundred orders. I’m also a bit disappointed with many of the aspects of preorder process and I’m going to do my best to make sure that I’m communicating as much information as I can going forward to make sure everyone is informed and any questions are answered.
@dkryder - I’ve seen your messages and I’ll reply to them shortly. We’ll do our best to get your order to you in whichever timeframe works for you.
@sswzone - You should have received an invoice of your payment going through, if you didn’t, submit a ticket at our support site and we’ll get that for you. You’ll also get a separate email once your order ships that will include your tracking information.
@AlbertZeroK - You’re somewhat correct. The seller is responsible to get your product to you. Once we ship the product and it leaves our warehouse, the responsibility falls to the carrier (FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL, etc) to get the package to you. If something is lost or damaged, normally, the buyer has to open a claim with the carrier first. Once the claim is completed, we can move forward with whatever happened, usually finding the missing items or replacing them. But @ninjatill was correct, if your order doesn’t make it to you, contact us. In most situations we can get a replacement sent out to you.
From handling a number of these, if your order says delivered and you never received it, FedEx requires the buyer to open a claim and Particle is unable to do so on your behalf. If it never says delivered and it’s just stuck somewhere, you can open a claim or we can contact FedEx to investigate. Either way, contact us and we can help out!
As for our shipping company, they probably ship thousands of orders a day, but we’re not their only customer. They’re very much aware of what’s going on, but they’re also entering their busiest season as well, so we’re going to try to push as many orders through as we can as quickly and accurately as possible.
@DevRandom - We have been preparing our logistics, but the products haven’t been sitting at a fulfillment center for months, just waiting to be fulfilled. Our team has been working non stop for many many months to get the products ready. We’ve experienced some delays in receiving products to our logistics company, but it has taken a bit longer than we anticipated. Once we ship the products from our manufacturer in China to our logistics company in Indiana, they undergo lots of things before they’re ready to ship. Since all of the mesh products are brand new, they’re under more scrutiny in receiving, again, causing unexpected delays.
You’re right. Communication from us has been a bit lackluster and I truly apologize for that. I’m working on correcting that and trying to keep everyone as updated as possible.
@AlbertZeroK- We started shipping orders with only Xenon’s, accessories, or gateway shields at the end of October since we received those products first and they were ready to go. As of last week, we were waiting on the Argons/Borons to be fully received and ready to ship the remaining orders. Then last Thursday night (the day before orders were due to be submitted), I discovered an error with about 600 orders missing part of their starter kits on their order which we needed to fix before the orders could be submitted to our logistics company. Once we got that fixed, I then found the shipping error I mentioned above (with the shipping addresses not being updated correctly), which affected about 150 orders, which we finished fixing about an hour ago. The orders are due to be submitted at 8am EST tomorrow morning and they should begin shipping tomorrow. We’re going to see if they could bump up the number of orders they fulfill per day to help us out.
@kubark42 - thanks for understanding and sharing your thoughts! We appreciate your support!
@warthog9 - Looks like my colleague @KyleG replied to your ticket today!
@TimGTech - Thanks for your understanding! We appreciate it! Hopefully you won’t have to eat too many more Snickers 
Thanks everyone for reading this long-ass post, keep the questions/comments coming and I’ll reply as quickly as I can!
Kevin