Re: Any news on shipping for international backers?
by nmitchell » Thu Apr 04, 2013 11:26 am
TL;DR - International orders are shipping, just a little slower than North American orders. Unfortunately, we don’t have accurate delivery estimates because there are so many variables (see below), but rest assured, they are coming. If you’re looking for a detailed estimate of when you’ll receive your kit, we don’t have one for you yet (sorry!), but remember that we’re shipping 1,000 - 1,500 kits a week.
All right -- Let's break down where we're at with international shipping:
1. So far we've shipped a couple hundred international orders. Some of those have already arrived.
2. We’re shipping 1,000 - 1,500 units a week right now. Each week, we ship the majority of the units to a different region (see below). We started with North America, that’s why more NA backers have kits.
3. 1,000+ units will be shipped to Europe and Asia over the next few weeks.
4. We're setting up a top-notch international fulfillment network so that we can speed up deliveries and lower shipping/duty/tax costs for backers.
5. We're now including tracking information for shipping orders at
http://www.oculusvr.com/sales. If your order has been shipped, you can login to see your tracking number.
Right now, the main bottleneck is the number of units coming off the line at the factory. We don't have a huge stock of units sitting in our warehouse waiting to ship out. As soon as we have enough units ready to ship a large batch, they ship out the same day.
Once a batch is ready, the next step is actually getting them from the factory to your doorstep. And that’s when shipping development kits internationally starts to get tricky. The proper way to ship internationally is to ship large quantities (1,000+) to different continents (Americas, EU, Asia) for local distribution, thereby significantly reducing the overall shipping cost per unit.
Why is this important? Cost and speed. An example: shipping one dev kit from our factory to Germany costs more than $125. Instead, we can ship 1,000 dev kits to Europe via air as a single ‘batch’ and that costs roughly $20 per unit, plus another ~$15 from our European warehouse to your European doorstep. The single batch way is also faster because it clears customs more quickly.
In contrast, let's pretend we fulfill all the orders using FedEx from Oculus HQ. It would cost $100 - $200 for us to ship a single dev kit from California to Europe/Asia, depending on where it's headed. For example, it costs roughly $100 to ship from Oculus HQ to Buckingham Palace, UK, 6-8 day delivery, plus the cost of shipping from the factory to Oculus HQ. You can see that if we did this for every international unit, we'd burn through a lot of money very quickly.
Unfortunately, shipping directly from the factory to backers is just as expensive (~$125+) and even slower. We experimented with shipping a few dozen units from China and they were held in customs for almost two weeks.
We have a great logistics team on board now, but they walked into the logistical storm that we'd already created with the Kickstarter (Sorry, Oculus logistics team!). We're moving as quickly as we can to put a more streamlined system in place so that kits are flying out to developers faster and faster.
Thanks again for the patience and support. Sorry for the wait. We’re on it!
-- Nate
nmitchell
Team Oculus