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That damn international customer, cheaping out with the 36.22 us dollar shipping option instead of getting the most expensive 36.22 us dollar shipping option and delaying your theoretical future product delivery, with this kind of user experience it's truly a mystery to me why US customers are the majority but evidently nothing could or should be done or discussed about it and really I should help out by just never buying so that majority can feel more reassured that nothing will change
A surprising number of people in this thread seem to have a para-social investment with the billing and shipping methods of this company.I’m invested in Paizo not making me wait until every last person has received their subscription before I get access to the PDF because an international purchaser is paying for the cheapest method of shipment so thinks the most fair thing to do is make everyone wait until they get there’s. Yes, that kind of suggestion results in an emotional response.
I'm not sure why my feelings on the issue should bother you since my feelings and opinions don't dictate Paizo procedures. You're more than welcome to advocate for change in the appropriate Forum, and I won't even say a peep in those threads.
Old Man Robot's suggestion for a "better system for everyone" is objectively worse for me, personally, and probably for other people, so he should not be surprised by the response, for the relationship the consumer has with the producer is not, in fact, parasocial. It is a very real business relationship.
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I've paid $14 for international shipping and got the pdf early, I've also paid over 150$ and got my order shipped after street date. I don't think it's tied to how much you pay.
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Also, as much as Euros like me dislike it, Paizo does 80% of its business in US/CAN, and most of the RoW (which is pretty much EU+UK+AUS+NZ) is handled by local distributors and localised editions with the "European who buys directly from Paizo and is willing to eat VAT/customs to get their free PDF" customer story being very peripheral to the company's bottom line.
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I think the real question is, does the company really need to amend their entire release workflow so as to not bum someone out?Because it is not one person.
The number of people who have a negative emotional response to a shipping practice is immaterial to the point that the shipping practice doesn't need to be built around emotional responses.
A surprising number of people in this thread seem to have a para-social investment with the billing and shipping methods of this company
It's a shipping method, it can't invest back.
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I wonder if there's a way for the customer to "opt-in" to allowing Paizo to take the funds when shipping starts. Maybe a check-box on your account page or something.
That way everyone who wants to can get access to the PDF as soon as possible, and you wouldn't have to worry about people canceling subs since the funds would already be taken. And then it doesn't matter if the physical book ships day-1 or a week after street date.
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I wonder if there's a way for the customer to "opt-in" to allowing Paizo to take the funds when shipping starts. Maybe a check-box on your account page or something.
That way everyone who wants to can get access to the PDF as soon as possible, and you wouldn't have to worry about people canceling subs since the funds would already be taken. And then it doesn't matter if the physical book ships day-1 or a week after street date.
That would depend on how their payment provider’s rules work. If they say no payment until delivery of the order, which is the physical product, that means no payment until the physical order is shipped. Which brings us back to “no access before payment as the risk of cancellation is too high.”
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Global capitalism is complicated. What works for one company could be related to what other companies that they partner with, where those companies are located and, in the United States, even what state a company is located in can have an impact on their labor practices, how and to whom they pay their taxes, and what kinds of shipping options are available. Trying to "do Paizo's work for them" by guessing what systems they have in place to facilitate their product delivery schedule for subscriptions is at best asking for a polite email reminding you that their practices are transparent, and subject to factors too complicated to have an employee back track unless there is an actual problem with your order. Unless you were promised getting your order before other people or the terms of the agreement of your subscription are being violated, the question is really "why does this bother me so much?" because no where in your subscription does it say that Paizo has responsibility to make sure that no one gets access to their products until the official release date. Doing so would very likely require changes to business practices that would cost money either to implement or more likely to monitor moving forward. Who is going to pay this cost? Because I am not willing to pay more so that I can get access to my subscription PDFs later.
These discussion boards are for discussion, not for asking specific questions of the company. Any random person with an account can post here and it is pretty fair to expect any answer you get on these boards to come from any one of those random people. Making posts to discussion boards and then getting defensive when random people give you answers you don't like fosters a frustrating environment because you are misusing the boards when you make posts like that, not because other people won't respect your wishes. When people post to public forums, you get public debate. Blake's Tiger has been beyond an outstanding citizen in donating their time in assembling resources for anyone curious about why Paizo's current practice is what it is.
If the goal of a thread like this is to create public sentiment for change to that system, and not understand that system, then expect people that don't want change to express their voice as well.
But they would have already paid for the book.
Why cancel if you're not getting your money back either way?
I think there's a decent change you are getting your money back if you dispute the charge with a decent story between pdf delivery and book shipment. There's an excellent change this ties up resources at Paizo and the payment processor resolving this that no one wants to spend.
Paizo is a book publishing company. Deciding that isn't their primary business anymore would be a pretty massive change that would require shaking up an unimaginable percentage of their business model. Subscriptions are not Paizo's only income stream or product.
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I just can't help but feel like everyone getting the PDF on the street release date guaranteed and the book somewhere between "quite early" and "irritably late" has a better "vibe/customer experience" than a certain seemingly random crapshoot chance to get the PDF early and then the book in the mail 3-14 days later.
There is no reason doing it that way should in any way impact preview PDFs going out and copies of the rules going to the various partners who need it early in order to have day-1 support for their own products other than aversion to change, that is, unless there is some law in WA (or maybe a stubborn ethical stance taken by leadership?) that prevents sales from being finalized until it is confirmed that a physical product is physically in a box that's been put on a truck already.
The process of sending the pdf at the time the book is processed for shipping is also a unified process for each order. Your card is charged and auth code verified; physical product is picked, packed, labeled and set aside for shipper pickup; your digital product is released to your account.
Doing it in the ways suggested above alters that into multiple batched processes.
Processing all payments -> Picking all physical products -> Packing, labeling and shipping all products -> releasing all digital products.
Paizo isn't a huge megacorporation with hundreds of warehouse and fulfillment staff members, any change to their workflow is a change to the amount of work their employees are engaging with. What improves your sense of whether a business process feels good or not, might have the opposite effect on the employee.
"vibe/customer experience"
Why does this matter in the least?
Getting it early or getting it late is a quirk of the process and nothing more.
People who get it early aren't being rewarded, people who get it late aren't being punished. There is not some mass inequity that needs resolving.
We really need to uncouple our emotional experience from the process at which stuff moves through the mail.
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I think the only conceivable way that Paizo would consider giving subscribers their complementary PDF until after the book ships, is if there was some kind of DRM in the PDF that "self-destructs" in case you cancel the shipment in order to try to get free stuff.
This is, I think, worse than having to wait a little longer.
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Getting it early or getting it late is a quirk of the process and nothing more.
Okay but does that make it a good thing?
We really need to uncouple our emotional experience from the process at which stuff moves through the mail.
Why? Emotional experience is central to our existence as a species. Discounting that is silly. Pretending customer experience doesn't matter is just flat out wrong given how much business can live or die on UX (not really at issue here, more speaking generally to an earlier statement).
... It also feels a little weird to worry about their emotional state given the way this thread has been going, but whatever.
Getting it early or getting it late is a quirk of the process and nothing more.Okay but does that make it a good thing?
No it makes it a completely neutral thing
We really need to uncouple our emotional experience from the process at which stuff moves through the mail.Why? Emotional experience is central to our existence as a species.
Take a beat, divorce yourself from the idea that we're talking about a TTRPG product from Paizo.
Does Amazon need to tailer its shipping practices around what makes you "feel good?" Does UPS? Does the Postal Service?
Discounting that is silly. Pretending customer experience doesn't matter is just flat out wrong given how much business can live or die on UX (not really at issue here, more speaking generally to an earlier statement).
It's not a matter of the user experience, they aren't a shipping company. Their product is not the delivery method.
It also feels a little weird to worry about their emotional state given the way this thread has been going, but whatever.
The whole argument has been about it "feeling bad" when books don't show up early and finding ways to tailor the process so everyone "feels good". The whole thread has been based on emotionality, but whatever.
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how has this gotten like 50 posts in 3 hours. this argument has to stop getting relitigated
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I just can't help but feel like everyone getting the PDF on the street release date guaranteed and the book somewhere between "quite early" and "irritably late" has a better "vibe/customer experience" than a certain seemingly random crapshoot chance to get the PDF early and then the book in the mail 3-14 days later.
There is no reason doing it that way should in any way impact preview PDFs going out and copies of the rules going to the various partners who need it early in order to have day-1 support for their own products other than aversion to change, that is, unless there is some law in WA (or maybe a stubborn ethical stance taken by leadership?) that prevents sales from being finalized until it is confirmed that a physical product is physically in a box that's been put on a truck already.
Again, they have said repeatedly that the reason they can't just do "all PDFs on street date" is that they can't charge you until they ship the product, and if they give you the PDF without charging, there is a possibility of you canceling your order while having the free PDF. What OMR suggested was that they not give anyone access to the PDF (either free or purchased until all the subscription shipments are out the door. Thus delaying the street date of the PDF in months where it takes longer to get them all out. That in turn would need to delay other partner products, because Paizo wouldn't want you to be able to buy the Foundry module without the PDF available, etc.
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One consequence of the legalization of drugs over the past years has clearly been that people familiar with the stability and design of Paizo's website for many years are advocating for a rewrite of their backend software that interfaces with shipping and digital products when they haven't even managd to add 2005 level forum technology or a sensical order button on web purchases yet.
"I would simply have Sudan solve it's water problems by building several nuclear power plants to drive desalination plants on the Red Sea."
I agree, this would work.
Then same goes for /corepreview pdf?
I believe the Core preview pdf will be made available on the firstday of GenCon (3rd August iirc).
--C.
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I support the idea of everyone getting their PDFs at the same time.
The only way that would work would be to grant them after every subscription has shipped.
I don't think anyone wants to wait until well after street date and I don't believe the tech investment would be feasible, for the reasons listed above about breaking the process out from one unified instance per person to multiple separate instances per person.
