Disappointed by pre-order shipping?

I just thought I'd set up a thread to discuss pre-orders, mostly to see if my experiences over the past few years have been par for the course or if I'm an outlier. My experience with pre-orders this year has been pretty lousy and it's really making me reconsider whether I want to continue to do so, with the main complaint being that I have to wait until well after release date to actually receive them.

To be clear, I'm not talking Amazon here - I feel like that might be a whole different discussion. I'm talking about when I pre-order directly from an artist's shop, a label site or a bandcamp pre-order.

So far this year, I'm fairly certain I've pre-ordered six things this way. One of them (iirc, it was the Sunn O))) Life Metal CD) showed up several days before the street date and another (totally blanking on it) showed up the day after. Cool. However, the other four didn't show up until well AFTER the release date. And I'm not talking a day or two, I'm talking a matter of 1-3 weeks after. One of them was this year's Dead box set which, whatever, we could (and have) fill(ed) a hundred threads about the vagaries of Dead.net shipping. It didn't show up until nearly two weeks after release date and after tons of other folks on the forum received theirs.

My latest disappointment came with the deluxe LP & CD package I ordered for one of my favorite new bands. I'm going to not mentioned them or the label by name here, because I'm not trying to single them out - rather use them as an example. They are a small label and I'm willing to cut them some slack. Anyway, I pre-ordered this bundle via the label's bandcamp site, which is also their official shop - linked to from their label site. I ordered it on August 28th, the record had a release date of October 18th and my order confirmed it would ship "on or around October 17th". So release date comes and my Twitter and Instagram feeds are filled with photos of people getting their bundles and displaying them. I'm getting excited, but totally aware that there was no release date guarantee and I'm still fine with waiting. My impatience got the better of me this morning and I went back to my order confirmation and clicked on a link about status. Well now it says it will ship October 24th and arrive by November 7th. Hmm, less cool. So now I'm looking at, most likely, not getting my order until three full weeks after release date. Kinda makes me question how pre-orders are beneficial. Especially when I'm seeing so many photos of people having already received theirs - it's not a wide issue or production delay. I guess even a quick email update would have been nice.

Anyway, it is the definition of first-world problems and I just need to be more patient, but it is frustrating to be waiting on pre-orders for weeks at a time when you could have already just walked into a record store and picked it up in person.

Anybody else noticed this trend? Or did I just hit a weird stretch?

 

I have pre-ordered from record labels this year (Rough Trade) and received excellent service, but never direct from the artists website (I think), however I have pre-ordered the new Van Morrision album as a bundle set and its due out this week, so I guess I will find out.


EDIT: I do pre-order direct from the Fairport Convention web site and never have any issues.

 

I preordered the new Magpie Salute from Mascot label group out of Denmark, and not only did I get the album a week early, they eamailed me the digital download code while it was in transit. Also, they packaged it with plastic corner protectors so if the corners of the package were to get smashed, it wouldn't damage the sleeve.

 

I have experienced this. Most recently I preordered DIIV's latest, and it arrived over a week after it was in my local stores. I don't preorder from bands/labels sites often, but I'd say at least half the time they arrive after their (usually Friday) release.

I'm also a pretty satisfied VMP member, but it's a bit frustrating when they announce (I'll use the Coltrane "Blue World" LP example here) a special pressing at/near the same time the general release of that album is unveiled, but their pressing is released months after the regular release.

 

Considering all the bad luck I have had with preorders, I simply choose not to do it unless it’s a digital download.

 

Some places are really good about, others are not. I often get my GBV pre-orders from Rockathon well in advance of street.

My most most recent late experience is with the new STP box. I've had it on order forever, street date got pushed back by a month, finally getting released last week. The band site had the shipping set up as of last Tuesday, but the damn thing still hasn't shipped.

Lesson on this is, in most cases, if I want something on the day of release, I try to go to my local. Although that isn't even foolproof anymore with all the distro problems that have been going on for months...

 

Yeah, I hadn't known about all of those distro issues across the country until last week when one of the really nice guys at my local filled me in a little. Sounds infuriating.

 

Yeah, having previously worked for a local store, I know and have become friendly with some other local shop owners and they're definitely weary from the whole experience. The one does have a sense of humor about the whole thing though as evidenced by the title of one of their lastest new release emails:

"List Of New Releases That Were Slated To Appear On 10/11/19 That Mostly Didn't, But Hey ... Points For Trying"

If you didn't laugh about it, you'd cry...

 

It was the stories of how many empty boxes they've gotten in their packages that killed me. Insane.

 

Empty as in, whole boxes with nothing them? Or boxes that could fit like 25 cds, but there's only one in there? We used to get the latter all the time. A big box with one cd and an air pillow. Makes no sense, they could have shipped those a ton of more economical ways. The industry has no sense, especially when it comes to shipping. They bemoan their money situation but, as an example, they used to overnight us promo materials for bands that we didn't carry. That had to be super expensive.

Last story - I was speaking with that same local shop guy and he showed me this loose cd. No case, anything. Just a CD. It was an album they had ordered to sell. Who knows how that happened. We had a good laugh over that one.

 

Literally empty boxes, with nothing in them. Like they would get a bigger box with a series of smaller LP boxes in them, each of which would hold 3-5 copies of the same album they'd ordered multiple copies of - but they'd open those smaller boxes and they'd be nothing but air. Or, times where they'd send multiple copies of an album, with each record boxed individually within a larger box.