All these wonderful goodies on their way to me- what did you get?

[pammy]

I had the Icon in my cart and clicked "Go to Shipping" at 1:01 PT and got an empty cart message

I feel your pain. That happened to me too. In the past, we had 5 minutes to check out. This time the items were out of the cart in seconds. It was shockingly fast. Congrats to everyone who got what they wanted. I am going to have to wait until a future restock.

[bluedawg]

yeah, i was here within 1 minute of opening, and both the icon i wanted (logic blue) and the PIKA i wanted (seapine) were already sold out! i guess i'll wait around for the next batch, but sheesh! y'all are QUICK.

HOO BOY that was stressful but this time i got them both! my heart was pounding! 😂 i also got a travel cubelet in dawn (my first TC! and my first dawn!) and a super mini GWOP in the new recycled nebulous grey -- i had both of those already waiting in my cart, so i could *pounce* on the icon & the PIKA.

whew!!!

[Artemis]

Managed to get an Icon in Seapine/Ultraviolet during the second restock. I did it on a laptop this time. It seemed faster than when I tried on my phone this morning.

Excited to see it in person! Thanks to the TB Crew!

[Juliana]

I had the Icon in my cart and clicked "Go to Shipping" at 1:01 PT and got an empty cart message

Is this really all actual end-user demand, or is there some kind of eBay arbitrage scheme happening?

Same thing happened to me! I got all the way to the payment, tried to submit the order, and it was too late. Bit of a bummer as I missed the earlier debut as well, and had to step out of work to try and get this one from my phone. I was hoping to have the Icon for my trip in January, but it'll probably just have to come with me another year.

[BWeaves]

2nd run. I was refreshing until they showed up and one of my preferred Icon colors was gone by the time I finished my order. But I did get a couple of items I missed first time through.

[xyppy]

I managed to snag a Seapine Pika. I checked out before looking if anything else I might want was in stock because I didn't want it snatched from my cart.

[K9TB]

I had the Icon in my cart and clicked "Go to Shipping" at 1:01 PT and got an empty cart message

The Black/Black Icons went within SECONDS! Same thing happened to me. I was hitting refresh on the Icon screen, so I put one in my cart probably within 1 second of it going live.

It's strange how disappointing it is. I was hoping to use it on an upcoming trip. I keep telling myself "It's OK, you can use another great bag you already have, and you'll probably have an Icon for the next trip". But I'm still bummed!

[DQBunny]

We do expect there will be another rush on the Icon, HLTs, and others at 1:00pm.

Someone shared this strategy with us, so we'll share it with you:
Add the items you want to your wish list NOW, refresh the page around 12:55 - 1:00pm, and add them to your basket as soon as you can / check out.

This is exactly what I did. Everything else I wanted was already in stock, so it was all sitting in my cart and waiting as soon as it refreshed right at 1 for the second stock. My credit card is all loaded into 1Password, so I blew off that text message thing it was trying to make me do, click one button to fill in the credit information, and I was good to go.

BTW, this was my first Tom Bihn order since November 2016! I couldn't believe it had been that long. I wound up getting:

• Icon in Seapine Green/Ultraviolet Zipper (the item that drew me into stalking the pre-orders)
• Small Cafe Freudian Slip in Island
• Small Q-Kit to use as a coin purse
• Ghost Whale Organizer Pouch in Scrap Black/Ultraviolet Zipper (small, for my reusable utensils)
• Nik's Wallet #3 in Viridian (finally replacing the clear organizer wallet I got here 10 years ago, so old the plastic yellowed!)
• 8-inch keystrap in Ultraviolet

Thank you to Moriond, whose detailed shots of the Icon and what it could hold not only sold me on it, but my first Freudian Slip

[kathryn]

This is legitimately the first time I've ever been grumpy about missing out on a debut order. I think it's because I fell in love with the all black stealth logo Icon on first sight, AND live in daily fear that something will happen to my beloved all black Imago so I was really, really hoping to get a backup/replacement of sorts. Here's hoping I have better luck in mid-December.

[Shanisol]

I thought it was going to work out this second go around, but after going through checkout, no icon. Again. In under two minutes. So, I'll just pass on everything this debut as I don't want to pay shipping twice. What an exercise in frustration. Hopefully the bag will be available again some time next year. Congrats to all who got what they wanted. :-)

[awurrlu]

I had the Icon in my cart and clicked "Go to Shipping" at 1:01 PT and got an empty cart message

Is this really all actual end-user demand, or is there some kind of eBay arbitrage scheme happening?

I had the same experience both at 8:01 PT and 1:01 PT and wondered the same thing. Such a bummer!

[kkintea]

After missing first round...Managed to get first choice PIKA and second choice ICON while navigating three children 2 and under down a jetbridge to board. Did I mention two of said children were squabbling over who could carry the small shop bag. With my sister then carrying one toddler and one baby I managed to checkout. Whew! What a day.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Lia]

Wow, I strolled back in just to check, thinking the second round couldn't possibly be so hard core as the first. Wrong! All my choices gone again.

This is good news for me, really. It means I want the same colors lots of people do, so they'll almost certainly be restocked!

That black/black stealth combo was popular, huh? Maybe gonna make that combo in some other bags? I mean, I already have plenty of totes, but a stealth black ZTSB or PT would be a useful addition.

[julia]

Re: the shopping cart and how it doesn't reserve inventory: it's a complicated choice. In order to enable the website to do that, we'd need to use a third-party app/database that could conceivably contribute to the website loading a little slower on high volume Internet days like today (we experienced this previously w/a different app). That aside, it could cause frustration if people add items to their carts, those items are reserved for hours, and the cart is abandoned: then those items would be automatically added back to the website at a later time, perhaps when other people have already chosen second color options because they thought their first choice was sold out.

Couple ideas re: reserving items in the cart. Most of them aren't good, but they are options

• Let people see how many of a product are in shopping carts. ("This item is out of stock, but 15 of them are in people's shopping carts and may be available for order in the next day.") Then people can decide whether to fall back to a second choice or wait for their top pick.
• Reserve the items for a set amount of time, e.g. 10 minutes, a la Ticketmaster. This is pretty stressful—ever buy event tickets and get flustered entering your card details?—but the upside is that people won't have to wait more than 10-15 minutes to see if their favorite item becomes available once again. It does have some accessibility concerns (e.g. people who aren't able to complete the checkout in time).
• Do a pre-order lottery. Take requests over the course of a week, then randomly assign available stock to people. Phish have done this for popular concerts. If someone changes their mind and declines (or doesn't respond soon enough), pick another person who was waiting.
• (Semi-)randomly release more and more stock throughout the day. Whoever happens to load the page at the right time wins. This option has a number of problems—extra server load, favoring people who don't have to work all day, someone getting two items might have to make two separate orders, etc.
• Hold a contest ahead of time that ranks people; people with the most points get higher priority. Think: Supermarket Sweep.

My votes:
Shopping cart # holding: partial like, partial dislike, depends on demand. Not useful to know if 2 or 200 people have it in cart and may be snatching it in 10 seconds if I can't check out fast enough.
Reserve: like. maybe more like if in tandem with the # in cart. maybe dislike if it results in constant refreshing for 4 hours instead of 40.
Pre-order lottery: dislike personally, but I would understand. I dislike "gamifying." These reek of a lack of transparency when I've participated in them. Plus, people can have 20 email addresses, so it doesn't end up being truly even and adds too much contest aspect to what is meant to be a straight commerce transaction experience in my opinion.
Releasing stock at random: lol. against. This makes no sense. Also there used to be apps that would auto refresh at intervals and notify you when pages change, so that is still uneven for access.
Ranking folks with points: ??? what on earth?

Some materials delays forced us to choose between shelving some of these designs for later release or offering them knowing they’d prob. sell out in early December; we chose the latter, figuring we would make some folks happy and also get an early indication of which designs and colors were most popular so we could better plan ordering thereafter to be able to stock the items in 2020. However, this may have not been the best choice, considering how quickly they did sell out...

Though I think customers would understand with the reasoning above with wanting to release a few on time versus many later, I do agree that a par of 5 (or however many) of certain items was a little low. Perhaps the internal mission or goals of the debut should be solidified, especially as to whether this time around has fulfilled that purpose.

FOR HOLDING:
I know this is happening/expected on many ticket sites, so I refresh a lot. For tickets, this is usually 20 minutes or less. Sometimes I'll play the strategy to wait for someone to abandon tickets. However, this definitely contributes to website load as it encourages refreshing - a LOT of refreshing - and contributes to slowness. Usually though, this is dependent on the type of purchase. I would think it honestly strange to see the countdown timer on TB except for debut days.

I will say this. If I were participating in this debut, I would be really surprised to experience the items being checked out before I could. But a good handful of these items for 13:00 have gone in less than a minute. Sometimes my purchase is contingent on one item. If an item or release is going to be prohibitively hard to get - I will at some point stop trying and not purchase anything at all. In thinking about upcoming halcyon release, I don't remember now how it was like for the two fjord/monarch/sitka releases but if they were here today, selling out in a minute with only two chances to get the items, with some items only having one big release, I would be way, way more disappointed.

Holding strategies may play well into "hold until 12/3" - I think the team can keep thinking about that whole process, too.

AGAINST HOLDING:

The color swap example you mentioned; potentially more emails/calls about switching or cancelling specific items aka an administrative time suck from the customers who are some of the most loyal; endless number of outlying scenarios regarding available items.

In terms of weird other ways to change traffic and modify or manipulate demand: In general, these can be kind of frustrating. Lotteries are more time invested on both ends; set up, entering personal information, succesfully getting the invite (would that be color specific?), using invite through whatever process.

First come first serve is simple, straightforward, and no one really argues about the fairness. Less BS.

Encourages people to add more than what they plan to buy to cart. Adds additional perceived demand, depending on how often people add to cart and do not buy.

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I was under the impression that items held for a few minutes. When did that change?

First come first serve makes the most sense but I think it does give an unfair advantage to those with faster devices, internet, fingers, etc. to checkout (thinking about folks with different ability capacities, those who do not have info saved, tech glitches, folks who do not know about wishlists). Plus if the team is at the point where they're manually releasing and/or releasing slightly early, then the process is not as clear cut as it appears.

Weird other ideas: Add all wishlist to cart? One click?

Not sure if you have the metrics, but I wonder how many people were able to add the "x" number of an item to their cart and then did (and didn't) check out with it. I think that will be genuinely helpful to determine how off your supply/demand ratio is and what measures need to be taken for. How I'd expect changes to the process knowing that, for example, 120 folks added 5 icons of a certain colorway to cart, would be different in comparison to I would if 130 folks added 50 icons.

[Darcy]

Quick update to my original update post: we are going to make another production run of Tom's Firewood Carrier. It will ship by mid-December.