How this store works - updated 02/23/22
How our store works has been greatly altered by COVID-19 and taking on extra staff so this is a complete rehash.
Fortraflex SCART: These are listed every Saturday morning around 6am and are kept in stock til they sells out, which is usually around Tuesday. It is put back into stock on the Saturday after. Has a dispatch time of 3 days.
Coax and other cables: Are listed roughly every 6 weeks now, all day on a selected Sunday (check banner) on a preorder basis. During this Sunday, we will change the subtitle under the buy it now button to reflect when items will dispatch. If you don’t want to wait for that amount of time, please don’t purchase and ask for a refund later - there is now a lot of work contracted out ergo we’re losing money when people do this. We offered the faster fortraflex option for this reason. If you need your cable quickly, please don’t purchase on preorder days as Fortraflex bought at any other time has a much faster turnaround.
Custom cables: These are kept available at all times and are on a preorder basis.
The banner at the top of the store: this will be kept updated to reflect dispatch times on cables.
The order status page: This is listed in sequential numbering order and reflects when your cable is likely to go out. Sometimes there are delays due to hardware issues but we won’t let them go over a week. Unless you made a non standard request on your order.
Special requests: Please don’t ask us to change standardized cables as sold on store as work is contracted out and is fairly regimented now. We can usually honor requests but it also causes delays as they have to be re-allocated to times when we build custom cables. Please don’t ask for things that are in the custom builder like extra audio lines, sync strippers, etc in standard cables as they cost extra money and time, and working out invoices is time consuming. Please use the custom builder for this.
Please don’t use the custom builder then ask us to make something completely different in the notes. Example: Don’t build a scart cable then put in the notes “I want an s-video cable.” The custom builder is effectively stocked with parts we have in stock. Please don’t do things like ask us to put a VGA sync combiner or a YpbPr converter in a custom cable as this requires a lot of R+D and designing PCBs and it’s not an option we have time for unless we are designing a completely new product that will be sold on the main store as-is at some point in the (probably distant) future. We’ll just immediately refund requests like this in future.
We used to list every Sunday then dispatch orders made that Sunday over the coming week, but demand getting greater and greater started to make that impossible (the store sold out within minutes), and shortages of stock over covid made stocking everything every time similarly impossible so we have switched to a preorder model for coax listing approx every 6 weeks now (down from 3 months at start of Covid) and a shorter delivery time for Fortraflex - which is now premade.
We are trying to bring down dispatch times. We are hoping to have listings more often and are streamlining things to make this possible, however we spend much of our time in the day now chasing down whatever the covid shortage of the month is. Most recently this was capacitors and bncs. There is a brass shortage affecting bncs and a covid shutdown in Malaysia affecting electrolytic capacitors. We have enough capacitors for the year but only because of stocking up on tantalum as an option. This is selectable for an extra dollar on relevant cables.