SUGGESTION: delivery dates

There have been a number of complaints recently regarding the postponement of delivery dates and its effect on budgeting. It's time to change the paradigm to be more accurate. Why not post a "no earlier than" date? Switch to a delivery date when it is actually ready to ship.

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Comments

Jonathan Pitts

Very sensible.

It is useful to have a ballpark date early on to know if we are going wait 3 months or 2 years for the pre-pub to come to fruition. Either the "no earlier than" or something like "estimated 2011 Q2". If the estimated date has to change, we understand and don't mind that.

A delivery date should only be set once it is certain (with rare exceptions for last-minute emergencies). Once it is there on the orders page we start to get our hopes up and it gets very disappointing to have these dates changed again and again.

There have been lots of posts on this recenlty. It's time for Logos to take notice and make some changes. I await a "no earlier than" date for this to be implemented!

Jacob Hantla

I really like this plan....I've been caught by surprise by quite a few recently.

Andy

I think this is a really good idea. [Y]

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/245369#Comment_245369

Yes, I have to admit to being disappointed multiple times these past few days, as Lion History Series, Complete Shakespeare, and several other products got pushed back, in some cases a day at a time for several days. If it's going to slip due to unforeseen circumstances, I'd rather see a realistic accurate slip rather than just teasing us with one day at a time. And I'd rather not see any estimated ship date until it's quite certain nothing else could come up that would make it slip.

However I know this is one of those areas where it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time. If we all told Logos what our druthers would be, there would be at least three or four different sets of conflicting requirements, which Logos wouldn't be able to meet.

So I've generally been keeping my mouth shut and going back to other things that I need to get done, which I'd probably be procrastinating on if I had the shipped resources to play with.

This is one exception, just to say to everyone else, "yes, I feel your pain."

I'm not sure how Logos can resolve it, other than get better at estimating, and get better at foreseeing possible problems further in advance, and get better at strong-arming (or sweet-talking?) publishers into not being the cause of slipping. Maybe if they had to take a hit in the form of 5% of the pre-pub price (for all those of us who ordered it in prepub) for each time the date slips, maybe that would be a bit of an incentive to get it right the first time, and to avoid the slipping by dribs and drabs phenomenon. (However perhaps some users would rather see that than a disappointing major slip.)