Quote Originally Posted by Maruten View Post
I think we all understand that distribution can be a clusterbeep that is largely out of retailers' hands.

Hasbro/TLTC is not a useful comparison though. Hasbro doesn't retail directly to the public.

TLTC does. If I place a preorder and it hasn't arrived three months after the date I was originally given by TLTC, sure, it may not be their fault that the product is delayed. But if I email them multiple times asking for updates because they haven't communicated anything about the delays and their website still shows the original date - and every other store in the country received their stock on time - I think I'm entitled to consider that bad service.

This isn't an occasional thing, this is apparently an ongoing issue with the way they run their business. We always hear that they're just a dude in his garage or whatever, don't expect Amazon-level service. Sure, that's fine. But if you don't have time to respond to emails from your clients when they're saying "hey, you keep ignoring me and I want to know what's up with all that money I sent you in June" then you have some issues and you need to make some changes. Maybe that's extra staff, maybe that's limiting your stock levels so you don't have so much to deal with. Maybe it's both those things, or something else - finding alternate channels for acquiring your stock, etc. But it's bad form to take your customers' money and then ignore them (and I'm not suggesting that they never respond to queries, but I think we've seen enough reports of poor or non-existent communication to agree that this is a thing).

I have bought from them on eBay many times and been happy with their service and prices (on in-stock items). I won't be buying directly through the website again though, and I'll think twice before shopping in their eBay store too. That's a bummer because yay for supporting local businesses, but it's hard to do that when they can't reliably provide the service we're paying them for.

People say "I'm patient, I can wait" and that's cool, sometimes, yeah - you don't mind waiting a few extra months as long as you get the product eventually. But maybe their stock falls through or they're shorted and allocated half the stock they need to fulfill preorders, and you're stuck with an aftermarket hunt and inflated prices because every other store sold out months ago. That's just not really how I want my collecting to run.
The main thing they should do (which they've tried but never keep up with) is keeping their ETA's up to date - then they wouldn't get the emails! Communicate with your customers en masse, that's what the Facebook page is for!

I've never missed an order from them - got another great big box of cool stuff from them last week - but the delays and lack of comms are definitely an issue.

Also a little worrying is that they still haven't got any pre-orders for Wave 2 of Siege, or any of the new Studio Series stuff? So hopefully this doesn't mean they're getting out of the Transformers game altogether.