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I just noticed that my latest subscription order is currently listed as shipping. Considering that it arrived yesterday, it's probably already shipped. I just thought I should point that out, in case you were going to ship it again for some reason.
Or did you find a way to ship things faster than light, thus causing it to arrive the day before? If so, I don't even want to know what the cost for this order is.
Director of Sales
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I just noticed that my latest subscription order is currently listed as shipping. Considering that it arrived yesterday, it's probably already shipped. I just thought I should point that out, in case you were going to ship it again for some reason.
Or did you find a way to ship things faster than light, thus causing it to arrive the day before? If so, I don't even want to know what the cost for this order is.
Heh... while I would love to discover and utilize FTL technology to deliver Pathfinder subscription orders before they are actually shipped (as since this would undoubtedly be the best use for this technology)... I have to admit that teh explanation for what's going on is much more mundane (if a bit long winded).
When we do a big subscription shipment, we process and "ship" all of the orders in large batches. "Ship," in this case, means charged, marked as shipped in our system, and the PDF released for download. We do this so that subscribers get access to the PDF as soon as possible. Otherwise subscribers would have to wait for as long as 3-5 business days, for their particular order to get through the shipping queue, before being able to download the PDF. All the while, people who happened to be at the top of the queue would be on the messageboards talking about the coolness.
However, this creates a bookkeeping problem, since an order gets "shipped" in the system, but may not actually get put in an envelope and sent out of the warehouse for up to 3-5 business days. This makes the order look like it's in transit for a ridiculously long time, and makes subscribers understandably very annoyed.
In order to avoid annoying subscribers, we instituted a new date for Pathfinder shipments. At the beginning of the shipment process, before we ship anything, we choose a date in the future by which we assume we will have all of the shipments shipped. This date is displayed as the "shipped date" on all of the orders for this particular Pathfinder, and all future reckoning for shipping times is based on this date. Any individual Pathfinder will actually leave the warehouse at some indeterminable point between the time you receive the shipping confirmation email ("Your PDF is available for download") and that date listed as the "Ship Date".
For this shipment, the pre-determined "Ship Date" is today. We finished shipping out the last of the Pathfinders on Friday, so the date is pretty accurate. If reality ever differs from our prediction to a large degree, we will go back and revise the Ship Date, but doing so is a rather complicated process with many implications, and will usually cause more confusion (and annoyance) for our subscribers than it than it will cure.
Thanks,
cos