- Posts: 46
- Joined: Tue Nov 06, 2012 1:48 pm
I saw the following on another message board. This makes perfect sense to me and is what I have suspected. Hope this helps!
["This is kinda long but some may find this helpful. I asked the US office about B&H and Adorama sending out Dec/Jan orders when others (like me) haven't got their April order. Dan May wrote back and gave me permission to post this.
"Hey Tim,
Let me take a stab at giving some very non specific information that still might be helpful.
The short answer is Blackmagic Design USA fulfills orders to our Distribution partner in the US. Then our Distribution partner fulfills orders to the resellers based on when their orders were placed and how many they ordered.
Blackamagic Design does not really have visibility on how many a reseller has 'sold through' to end user customers. We have a basic idea from our Distribution partner what resellers have placed on order by month. We've worked with them to try to figure out 'fair' ways to get the product out to dealers, again based on the time they ordered and the qty.
Here is a horribly simplified example using completely fictitious numbers.
Let's say Dealer A placed an order for 1000 cameras on April 20th, Dealer B placed orders for 200 cameras on April 20th, and Dealer C placed orders for 200 on May 15th. The Disti will break up a shipment of cameras to try to be fair to everyone. So dealer A may get 60% of the cameras, dealer B may get 25% of the camera, and dealer C may get 15% of the cameras in an incoming shipment that has reached the Distribution partner.
That's not exact math being used there, just an example of how things are roughly being split within our territory. So don't look too hard into that example because it only is meant to give the gist. The problem is of course that there are hundreds dealers that have ordered cameras in the US, ranging from a handful of units to… well lets say way way more than a few units, and spread out now over 10 months. We obviously can't give all of them to just the guys that are massive, nor is it horribly fair to give 100% to someone that ordered 5 cameras in August (another random example).
However all of this has no relevance to when an end user customer may get his camera. Let's say in our previous example Dealer A had 80% of his cameras spoken for by end users that placed orders in April, and Dealer B only had orders for about 10% of what they placed orders for back in April. Even though Dealer A is getting more cameras, Dealer B might be getting less units but actually sending units to people ahead of the first dealer. Or it could be completely reversed. We don't really know when customers are going to get their individual orders.
It's awfully complicated, and I don't think I've probably done the best in explaining it! Of course it wouldn't be a problem if we just had truck loads of cameras coming the past few months, though that is obviously getting better every week as the sensor supply improves. So everyone (Blackmagic, the Distribution Partner, and the Dealers) are trying to be fair about deliverables, but because of the aforementioned details it is, of course, very hard to make everyone happy.
I hope this helps. Hopefully a few more weeks and this problem will largely be overcome.
Best,
Dan May
Blackmagic Design"
Bottom line sounds like they are trying to do this as fair as possible, but if a B&H had a huge preorder in anticipation of customer orders then that could be why they are getting so many cameras and are able to full fill Dec orders while I'm still waiting for my April order. On the up side, my retailer said they have now shipped 3 cameras! So now I've moved up in line from being in the top ten to being in the top 7!"]
["This is kinda long but some may find this helpful. I asked the US office about B&H and Adorama sending out Dec/Jan orders when others (like me) haven't got their April order. Dan May wrote back and gave me permission to post this.
"Hey Tim,
Let me take a stab at giving some very non specific information that still might be helpful.
The short answer is Blackmagic Design USA fulfills orders to our Distribution partner in the US. Then our Distribution partner fulfills orders to the resellers based on when their orders were placed and how many they ordered.
Blackamagic Design does not really have visibility on how many a reseller has 'sold through' to end user customers. We have a basic idea from our Distribution partner what resellers have placed on order by month. We've worked with them to try to figure out 'fair' ways to get the product out to dealers, again based on the time they ordered and the qty.
Here is a horribly simplified example using completely fictitious numbers.
Let's say Dealer A placed an order for 1000 cameras on April 20th, Dealer B placed orders for 200 cameras on April 20th, and Dealer C placed orders for 200 on May 15th. The Disti will break up a shipment of cameras to try to be fair to everyone. So dealer A may get 60% of the cameras, dealer B may get 25% of the camera, and dealer C may get 15% of the cameras in an incoming shipment that has reached the Distribution partner.
That's not exact math being used there, just an example of how things are roughly being split within our territory. So don't look too hard into that example because it only is meant to give the gist. The problem is of course that there are hundreds dealers that have ordered cameras in the US, ranging from a handful of units to… well lets say way way more than a few units, and spread out now over 10 months. We obviously can't give all of them to just the guys that are massive, nor is it horribly fair to give 100% to someone that ordered 5 cameras in August (another random example).
However all of this has no relevance to when an end user customer may get his camera. Let's say in our previous example Dealer A had 80% of his cameras spoken for by end users that placed orders in April, and Dealer B only had orders for about 10% of what they placed orders for back in April. Even though Dealer A is getting more cameras, Dealer B might be getting less units but actually sending units to people ahead of the first dealer. Or it could be completely reversed. We don't really know when customers are going to get their individual orders.
It's awfully complicated, and I don't think I've probably done the best in explaining it! Of course it wouldn't be a problem if we just had truck loads of cameras coming the past few months, though that is obviously getting better every week as the sensor supply improves. So everyone (Blackmagic, the Distribution Partner, and the Dealers) are trying to be fair about deliverables, but because of the aforementioned details it is, of course, very hard to make everyone happy.
I hope this helps. Hopefully a few more weeks and this problem will largely be overcome.
Best,
Dan May
Blackmagic Design"
Bottom line sounds like they are trying to do this as fair as possible, but if a B&H had a huge preorder in anticipation of customer orders then that could be why they are getting so many cameras and are able to full fill Dec orders while I'm still waiting for my April order. On the up side, my retailer said they have now shipped 3 cameras! So now I've moved up in line from being in the top ten to being in the top 7!"]
Ordered From: B&H
Order Date: 09/16/2012
Delivery: Not yet....
Order Date: 09/16/2012
Delivery: Not yet....