It kinda feels like they are waffling around and cannot fill orders. By the time I get the board it will be obsolete. SMH
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I’ve found that though the my-order page has correct shipping information, the link under “Is your shipping address correct” above has it partially overwritten with the address of a former employer (no idea where that came from). Attempting to change it doesn’t seem to take: a page reload shows the wrong one again, while my-order still has it right. I’ve sent in a support request, but figured other folks might want to check the two places for consistency.
Had you been using the platform for The past five years, you’d know that not to be true.
You can’t ship 6000 orders all over the world at the snap of your fingers. It takes humans to pick & pack & ship them. There’s only so many orders one can put together in a day. The orders are being processed as quickly as possible and available (from China).
I get that everyone is eager to get their new boards, but waiting one week more or less is neither the end of the world, nor does it make them obsolete.
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I dunno the order was created last July, pushed back several times and know no one really knows when things being sent out. I’m sure it will work itself out, but the optics aint so good.
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Hey Kmmonk, thanks for all your work keeping us updated as best you can. Pardon me if this question has been asked many times already: Is there any estimation for orders placed in the summer (May through July)? My card was charged on Nov 1st and I'm curious if these orders will likely be shipping this month, December, or early next year. Do you have any guesses/ideas? Thanks again
Whole thing feels like a kickstarter project, except I mostly know I’ll get the products or get the money back. 
I don’t think anyone is suggesting Particle doesn’t have a tough task shipping things out. However it is impossible for anyone to accept that the Mesh devices were shipped in any meaningful quantity in October (or on time), so they were quite later than promised. Also quite a bit later than promised before that. As well as later than promised before that.
Moderators being confrontational in defense of Particle doesn’t help paying customers (ie the community) feel welcome at all or acknowledge the frustration I and others experienced during this process. Hopefully moderators in the future could take a slightly more professional tone for the good of the community.
Personally, I’m quite disappointed in how the preorder was handled. Particle should have been well past the point they are at now before they opened the doors on the preorder. Had I known the reality of the timeline I would not have preordered at all. Besides, the window for using the Mesh devices I ordered on the project I had in mind has closed. There was still a chance I could have worked them in had they shipped in Oct, but alas, they did not. If I could cancel my preorder now, I would. (Especially since learning of the pricing structure)
Not that I am a make-or-break customer for Particle by any stretch of the imagination as Particle devices have just been curiosities for me. Because I didn’t get hardware in my hands I had to learn to use other devices like the nRF52 and ESP32/8266 directly so I look at Particle as a step backwards at this point. (I would definitely reconsider if the “local cloud” made a comeback… however Particle’s business model is entirely against that now).
PS, originally ordered on 2/13 at 12:33pm (roughly 2 hours after the preorder email was sent to me), billed Oct 31. Still don’t have any idea when my preorder will ship, almost a year later and months after they were supposed to ship at that time. If you can’t accept that is frustrating and people want their voices heard concerning it, maybe being a moderator isn’t for you.
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yeah, there’s a whole bunch of possibilities. maybe a bunch of the workers for the fulfillment company took a hike last week. who knows? in any event the shipment schedule is now pressing very hard against my ability to receive. i hope particle does not expect everyone to be able to accept a package whenever it arrives because that is not the reality here. i notified the office, and asked for a suspension of my shipment until jan 2019. no reply yet.
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Placed my pre-order Feb 13. Credit card billed Nov 2. No receipt, no email of any sort. I know I could spend an hour reading all of the information about timelines and priorities, etc. etc., but I’m just not up to it. Most companies I deal with send me a receipt or email when I’m billed and it contains an expected ship date. Any information Particle can provide about my specific order would be appreciated. Thank you.
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@ninjatill check with your credit card company, but my understanding of dealing with merchant accounts is that the seller is responsible to get the product to you, so if it gets lost or damaged, the shipper not buyer is responsible
@AlbertZeroK, I agree with you. Seller’s responsibility until you receive it. So the comment about parcel insurance was to mitigate Particle’s loss in the case of a lost shipment. If you don’t receive you package, even after tracking confirms it was delivered, then contact Particle. Particle should make it right for you somehow and in the background go after the parcel carrier to see what happened and recoup any losses.
@Moors7 it has not been a week, but months. I appreciate the chipper attitude but I come from a get it done mantality.
But the truths of the world are more likely that a shipping company can send 6000 orders in a week if they were properly prepared and staffed. But this likely did not happen or they are uncapable or we’re not prepared by particle.
Let’s leave the sugar coating to the sales reps, many of us are imune to it anyways.
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@Moors7 First, at this point I don’t really mind the delay personally, I had a lot time over the summer, but right now it’s unlikely I’ll have much time before the new year to really get involved with an IoT project. So the wait is a non-issue for me at the moment.
That said, I don’t get your overly aggressive defence of what really is a botched launch. In this day and age, 6000 packages is nothing to a fulfillment centre, which is the whole reason particle appears to be using one. These pre-orders were placed in February, after 9 months to prepare, Particle can hardly say they didn’t anticipate the logistics. It has already been weeks since shipping supposedly started, A team of six particle employees working in-house should have been finished by now (6000 packages over 2 weeks works out to 100 packages in an 8 hour shift, 5 minutes to fill a box and put a shipping label on it). It’s mostly 3 SKUs with a handful of items from 5 more SKUs. For this kind of delay with a fulfillment company, clearly something is going wrong.
And your comment of waiting one week more or less is just absurd. We have been waiting since July. Then it was September, then October, and then since October it’s been any day now. We’re well over a month past when we were told it would be within weeks. It’s not just the delay, it’s that all meaningful communication from Particle has completely shut down beyond you’ll get it any day now.
So while I’m really not personally put out by the delay at this point and don’t really have negative feelings towards Particle, comments like yours are like spit in the face to people with legitimate reasons for being upset.
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@kmmonk can you confirm all items are now in stock and if not which ones are out of stock and the timeline for them?
500 orders a day from. Your fulfillment company? Wow, can they not bring in assistance or otherwise work to improve this?
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I’m fine with the wait. What Particle is doing is hard and very ambitious. Contrary to how things look with Amazon, it is no mean feat to get 6k satisfied customers out the door, each one with their own customized order and many of them having credit card issues and/or non-standard addresses. Quality takes time, there’s no rushing hardware delivery like there is rushing software delivery. Scaling a hardware business takes time and money, and we customers swapped some of our time for money, i.e. the mesh preorder prices are a seriously good deal.
I have the attitude that if my business model requires unreleased hardware which has no equivalent elsewhere in the world, and I’m not paying enough to be the customer, I really need to reconsider my business plan.
P.S. If there’s anyone who would like to back out of their order, we would love to buy it from you. PM me and we’ll work out a deal.
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@kmmonk Sent an e-mail to support (as noted above), but since it also says above that if you haven’t been able to charge by the 16th the order will get canceled (and it’s the 13th). Never go charged, and never got any e-mails about needing to update my credit card. Did get the notice that shipping would be happening soon, just nothing since then. Kinda in limbo, and not sure what’s going on with the order (wife got her order yesterday, but she only had a Xenon, I’ve got all kinds of stuff).
Thanks, and sorry to poke - just want to make sure things are set before you start canceling things…
I will wait patiently. 
It’s not like we can do anything to speed up the process. It’s worth the wait and thanks guys for awesome products and working so hard.
I just eat a Snickers bar everyday and it keeps me calm. 
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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
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Thanks for the info @kmmonk its nice to get some insight into what is going on behind the scenes. It’s the lack of feedback that bothers people.
It’s great to hear the orders are shipping out of my home state which should equal next day delivery 
Can you tell me what city the fulfillment is located in by chance? I’m just north of Indianapolis.
They’re west of Indianapolis, in Plainfield! Should be a quick delivery!
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Sweet!
Everybody’s stuff is sitting 30 mins away from me
We have a huge FedEx hub here, no wonder they are using them 
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