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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;krispy, post: 1473566, member: 19065&quot;]These are just some thoughts I had thinking about t<i>his </i>product and when order fulfillment estimated dates are decided and announced:</p><p><br /></p><p>Does the Mint&#039;s decision to have announced shipping dates on mint-to-demand products hurt or help orders overall? </p><p><br /></p><p>The Mint having initially indicated that they would begin shipping in late July only to revise that now for later orders to ship in late September may simply indicate the mint-to-demand concept is really at play. This two month shipping difference may denote actual production time for the Mint to account for all orders received and for the fulfillment center to get all remaining orders out the door. </p><p><br /></p><p>It may suggest for us that the Mint prepared in advance far fewer units of this product than we may have previously considered were minted ahead of release and that the quantity of orders has risen well above that amount now.&nbsp; It may suggest sales continue to rise such that the Mint&#039;s production schedule is being adjusted to deal with the influx of orders, thus requiring them to put a new estimate on shipping for future orders received. </p><p><br /></p><p>But what if the new date scares off orders in the remaining sales period, now that they have published a difference for when orders ship. If order fulfillment and shipping is indeed done on a first-in/first-out system, that notion in collectors memory will return us to the panicked ordering early after release days the next time (if) the Mint offers a mint-to-demand product release. That will just clog the ordering lines like so many other release days. This doesn&#039;t rectify issues of customer service that this release helped to soften it&#039;s effect on consumers/collectors. It means we go a step back to the issues we faced when ordering new popular products from the Mint as before.</p><p><br /></p><p>The large time disparity will indeed pump up opportunistic flippers who feel the early sales time and the later orders shipped means they can set the mood for flipping opportunity and define when the secondary prices will begin leveling off. The effect of shipping some orders received so much later may indicate to collectors obsessed with mintage fluctuations that there will be many more minted than some may have hoped by mint-to-demand. This may hinder some sales of such products. Cancellation of orders or not following through to place orders in the last days may now occur after seeing how much longer one must wait to receive the product. </p><p><br /></p><p>The enthusiastic rush of &#039;new&#039; product will not seem so &#039;new&#039; if you are waiting for orders to arrive months later than others who ordered during the same window of opportunity. Does this mean there are two windows of order opportunity, one for flippers and the other for late comers? Is the Mint really unable to produce and ship any faster? Have they allowed too long the opportunity to order? It seems so and that that has created a gap when they can&#039;t fulfill all orders received in about the same delivery time? They just keep creating questions about their order fulfillment process. </p><p><br /></p><p>It was too opportunistic to suggest they could ship orders starting at the end of July. This September shipping announcement presents a quandry for some collectors which may effect sales. For the Mint to better control all these unknowns and avoid all these sort of questions and perceptions, back-ordered status is what all orders should have read until after the coin went off sale. Only then, should the Mint have begun revealing when orders would start to ship. Even then, they might have held orders until all orders were ready to ship or narrowed the estimated delivery status. Given that idea, had they not published the July delivery estimate, they could have waited to see how long all orders would have needed to take to be fulfilled and held off announcing such an early date.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is clearly a new process for the Mint who hasn&#039;t worked out all the buggy questions about how mint-to-demand and order fulfillment fits into their current ordering system. It comes as no surprise that they didn&#039;t thoroughly anticipate any/all of these same questions as we come up with because the Mint, given the numismatic product offerings, still doesn&#039;t understand its consumer and the hobby we engage in and depend on these products to maintain.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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