choopie says: So if it's too labor intensive to contact folks from a wait list ,then why have a wait list at all? If an item sells out, so be it, and if you find more stock, then make it available via the newsletter or social media.
How do you determine how long to keep a wait list open if you happen to find old stock long after its sold out?
To contact canceled wait list reservation members is a manual and labor intensive process. Active wait lists are automated.
We would like to keep wait lists open up to a few months after the item has come into our warehouse and shipped out to collectors. This allows for any declines to process, order cancellations to come in from various departments and such. We have been working to close out very old wait lists as we receive many complaints through Customer Service about this. Many collectors prefer to know if they need to look else where for their item. This gets to the answer for pixeltwin, dingo and progmatinee's inquiry.
Originally Posted by pixletwin
I have heard it said that WL are cancelled to encourage people to buy the regular. Rings true to me.
Yes, we have recently started to close certain pre-order item wait lists. If we have a huge amount of reservations that we know we will not be able to fulfill, we will restrict the wait list from taking new reservations and then we will cancel the bottom half of the reservations, which will allow these collectors to consider adding a regular to their collection or perhaps purchasing the exclusive item through another avenue. The top half of the reservation members, by reservation date, are kept through the processing window and will be offered any items that become available due to declines, cancellations, etc. The reservations will be kept up to a few months afterwards for any weird pops ups that may occur.
Nova says: Well i'm sure the backlash here and on facebook will insure that they extend their waitlists in future .
Actually we have had more hate mail for keeping lingering wait lists open so this backlash is on the losing side of the haters!
scary says: I think a fair thing to do is for you to post in advance that you found a sold out item and anyone who was on the wait list that got cancelled to send you a copy of the cancellation email after a set amount of time just do a lottery for those who sent the proof they were on the list. I think that sounds fair to me especially cause those who were interested in it long ago should have first chance at it. What do you think???
Skary smokin' crack that’s what I think! You trying to double the manual labor? We already tried lotteries, they went over like a hot rock. For clarity, we manually pulled the canceled wait lists, we emailed the people individually to see if they are interested so we already know they were on the list and where they were on that list. In some cases people emailed back instantaneously but in many cases it took weeks to hear from people, which is why we decided to release them back on site.
The 'pretty sketchy', ' playing coy' and 'corporate BS' remarks represent the understandable frustration of the collectors who feel they have been under served by the wait list service but I don’t agree with the dishonest picture that those remarks are attempting to paint. Keep in mind, in comparison have you also had wait lists that have been fulfilled or the offer to fulfill that you have denied? In many cases the disappointments are outweighed by the successes.
While sometimes our solutions are not ideal, the staff at Sideshow offers collectors options and seek to improve our collector services via forum and email feedback.
