Hello everyone, we never properly thanked our customers for their help in 2020. While our issues had less to do with world events directly and more to do with third parties, we still had them and they took a lot of our time away from customers to deal with. Therefore we greatly appreciate your continued support, and promise to deliver great things in the future.
To facilitate this, we are making a few changes to our shop policies. The main one is in regards to orders going to the same address. We currently sell on Etsy, our own website, and a few other marketplaces. Going forward, all orders shipping to the same address placed at the same time will need to be placed all on one order, on one site. We are working to ensure there are no price discrepancies, and all sales will be identical on all platforms. Our stock levels are also consistent on all platforms. This means that instead of placing a separate order for three items, you will need to place one order for all three items. This also applies to orders on different platforms. Instead of ordering one item on Etsy and one item on Ebay, the order will need to be placed entirely on one platform or another.
The reason for this is quite simple, shipping. We offer free shipping across the board for all orders of any quantity. Shipping out multiple packages to the same address costs more money than shipping one larger package to the same address. Therefore in order for us to offer free shipping, orders will need to be consolidated. If orders are not consolidated, we would have to begin charging shipping on every item to encourage customers to place everything in one order. Since nobody wants that, we may reserve the right to cancel duplicate orders and ask the customer to place everything on one new order. We feel this is a happy middle ground in order to streamline things and keep prices low.
We have been working tirelessly for the past few months to update our descriptions and item images to include as much information as possible about our products. Unfortunately, despite this, messages and issues arising from this are at an all time high. We kindly ask that you thoroughly review all descriptions and images before placing your order or reaching out to us. The more time we spend reiterating what is stated in item descriptions, the less time we have to develop products and fill orders. This means longer lead times and less new products being introduced, as well as products being restocked less quickly.
Building on this, we also kindly ask that you do not message us to ask when something will be back in stock. There are restock request fields on both Etsy and our website. These requests are indeed seen and acted on by us. When you use these channels, you will be notified by SMS or email when an item is back in stock. Since our items are made in small batches, there will be plenty to go around once we have made more.
That being said, they are usually not the first order of business. Restock requests come behind filling current orders and responding to customer messages. Therefore, the speed at which more of an item is made relies heavily on what we have discussed above.
After addressing some of the 2020 external issues, we were able to reduce our lead time from 6 weeks to 2-3 weeks. With your cooperation, we anticipate reducing this further to 1-2 weeks by March. (And many of our customers will testify that they've had orders ship out much sooner than that!) We understand many customers were disappointed with our lead times last year, however we really had no say in the matter. These new, lightning fast lead times will mean that you can order seasonal items at the last minute as opposed to months in advance. We've been working very hard to facilitate this based on customer feedback, and hope you guys will appreciate it!
A few more things to wrap this up. We lost access to our Facebook page for reasons I still can't explain. Unfortunately Facebook customer service is nonexistent, so the page will remain abandoned. Given this, I have no intention of having a serious Facebook presence in the future. If you want to keep up to date with our shop, I would strongly recommend visiting sawmillshop.com for regular blog posts, and subscribing to our email list. We do regularly post to Instagram, however they are owned by Facebook as well. So again, please subscribe to our email newsletters for updates and special discounts.
Once again, we appreciate your continued support, and look forward to great things in the near future!
