Hello all,
I’m one of the (many?) people that did not buy a Form1 through kickstarter, but placed a pre-order (February in my case). During this order, I got to chose my shipping option, which was immediately added to the amount to be paid. In this case, my shipping was US$ 379 (estimated delivery May 2013).
During these last months, I’ve been repeatedly coming back to the Formlabs website, to see if there was any news on when my printer would be shipped. As we all know, there was no such news. To deal with my frustration, I tried to see what would happen if I ordered a new Form1 (as I’m sure many of you have done as well). The Form1 price is the same, but lo and behold, the shipping to the Netherlands is now only US$ 279!!!
This means there is a US$200 difference in shipping if you ordered your Form1 to be shipped to the Netherlands back in February, or if you order one today. That basically means you’d be able to order an EXTRA bottle of resin and have some cash left for a cup of coffee.
Still believing in the good intentions of Formlabs, I created a ticket, asking for clarification on this issue, assuming I would be refunded for the lowered shipping costs. After waiting for 14 days, however, my surprise was big as I read the following answer:
In terms of the shipping cost for the Form 1 itself, you would have to reorder the printer to get the lower shipping cost due to the difference in exchange rates between now and this past February. However, reordering would cause you to lose your place in line – as soon as we’re finished fulfilling Kickstarter pledges, we’ll begin shipping pre-orders in order of when they were received. The choice is up to you, of course; we want to get you printing on a Form 1 as soon as we possibly can.
So… while I’m not a Kickstarter backer, I do like to think I helped support Formlabs by ordering (AND PAYING) the full amount while they were still developing their product. Months and months of waiting have gone by. And now we’re being punished for ordering early, because if you order at this moment, you’ll get a US$200 bonus!!!
I’m secretly hoping the answer was a mistake by one of the new customer support staff that was recently hired, and have asked for further clarification in the ticket. However, I’m very curious how this would work for Kickstarter backers. Would they also have to cancel and re-order their printers??? Would this also mean they would move back to the end of the queue??
Oh dear… I don’t even want to think of the upheaval that would cause. So be warned…