Posted: 4/14/2009 6:13:49 AM EDT
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BCM stuff usually stays in stock for about a half hour (give or take). Some folks get their email notifications well into the sale or after the batch is sold out. I do not know exactly why that happens.
Here is what I do know. **The email notifications all go out at the same time. **The email lists are absolutely HUGE HUGE HUGE. Take a look at our advertising. We have the inside cover on every single tactical publication in the United States. I would guess we have one of the biggest advertising budget in the black rifle industry. So any type of hard to find stuff from any manufacturer sells out immediately. **The email notifications are automatically triggered when the website is updated with inventory. I can not send them out early, send them out late, or not send them out. **When the products are placed in stock (and emails are sent out), within 120 seconds I am getting many system delivery failures (from emails with typos in them), and many many many email notifications of orders being placed on the website. So many many folks are getting the emails very quickly. I just don't know why? Last nights email notifications went out at exactly 8pm CST. If you got your email quickly after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? If you got your email a long time after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? |
It may simply be how the lists are ordered and processed - My yahoo account gets e-mail typically immediately (and then my Blackberry has it within seconds), but if I'm down the ways quite a bit in the notification list, I could see the mail engine over on your end (or ISP's end) trying to cope with a few million outbound e-mails (as well as the flood of new inbound e-mails) and the ones not near the top simply get delayed awhile.in the processing. It would look like they all go out at the same time, but the Exchange/Domino/sendmail backend is likely lagging dealing with that many messages at once. It's okay, not much you can do about it. I'm just going to switch myself to a e-mail notification on my thread subscriptions (annoying as I find it haha) and when you post a reply in a thread I'm subscribed to, it will encourage me to look sooner rather than later 
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I got my email last night a little after 8pm - around 8:15pm. Went to the website and put it in my cart. Dedided to also order a magpul trigger guard and added that to my cart. Went and checked on some other stuff and then went to check out. Lo and behold the upper had DISAPPEARED from my cart and only the magpul trigger guard was in there.  I was shocked.  You would think that once it was in your cart it would be reserved for you. But no, it was gone.  Oh well, next time i will immediately check out. No shopping around and trying to buy more stuff. Just a wake up call for anyone else out there. PUT IT IN YOUR CART AND IMMEDIATELY CHECK OUT AND PAY! |
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Mine arived at 6:34 pm West Coast time. That would put me @ 34 minutes after the fact. I suspect there are some band width issues on your end. After the email notifications were sent there could have been a systematic allocation of resources that slows down notification. Unless own your own ISP my guess is that anyone in the middle of the list, or later, is just SOL. I received my notification this am when I logged on. I suspect I am, once again, way down on the list.
You are doing your part to try to fulfill demand. Don't feel you need to change anything just because people bitch because they can't get what they want. If you wanted to do anything you may releaase in smaller batches. People will have to work a liitle harder, ie. sign up for email notification more often, but it will aslo churn the notification list changing the "front runners" more often. I respect the choices you have made for your business model. You have been equaly fair to everyone so I won't bitch. Maybe just whine a little bit. 
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**The email lists are absolutely HUGE HUGE HUGE. Take a look at our advertising. We have the inside cover on every single tactical publication in the United States. I would guess we have one of the biggest advertising budget in the black rifle industry. So any type of hard to find stuff from any manufacturer sells out immediately. Why is your advertising budget so large, if your capacity to deliver product is so low? I just don't know why? Last nights email notifications went out at exactly 8pm CST. If you got your email quickly after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? If you got your email a long time after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? Perhaps you should divert some of your Advertising/PR budget to eCommerce solutions which would improve your ordering system? I rec'd two emails, to two different email accounts (Gmail and .mil) at 9:15:29 PM EDT and 9:31:11 PM EDT, respectively. A friend rec'd his (at his Yahoo account) at 9:40 PM EDT. I know for a fact that he signed up for the email notification many days or weeks after I signed up for mine. I surmise that your system is sending the emails out in order which they were entered into your system, and thus anyone who signs up later in the pecking order is automatically at a disadvantage over those who signed up earlier. Again, your system is flawed, and I encourage you to rectify it, as you produce a fine product, and have otherwise good customer service. |
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I got mine at 8:09, but wasn't in front of the computer and didn't notice my iPhone went off. Missed this shipment, but got in on the carbine order last week. I have received a number of notifications, all in a timely manner, and with the product still in stock.
I use an IMAP account that goes thru a .edu server. Our email system is pretty responsive and seems to do a good job routing my mails quickly. It seems like a lot of people who are having delays are using web-based mail clients. |
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**The email lists are absolutely HUGE HUGE HUGE. Take a look at our advertising. We have the inside cover on every single tactical publication in the United States. I would guess we have one of the biggest advertising budget in the black rifle industry. So any type of hard to find stuff from any manufacturer sells out immediately. Why is your advertising budget so large, if your capacity to deliver product is so low? The advertising budget is for Bravo Company USA, Inc. Bravo Company USA, Inc is a very very large retail company. There are very few retail companies that ship as much AR15 products as we do. Our capacity to ship AR15 products is huge. Bravo Company MFG, Inc (BCM) has an advertising budget of zero. It is a very small manufacturing company and will not raise production and profit if it leads to lessoning the quality. |
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This was the email that I received yesterday @ 9:45pm EST
From: [email protected] Save Address Reminder To: davidds@ Subject: The product you want is in stock at bravocompanyusa.com Date: Monday, April 13, 2009 9:41:59 PM [View Source] Hello,A product you showed interest in is now in stock. BCM 16' Mid Length Upper Receiver Group Barreled Upper Receiver Group for your AR15, M16, M4.These will sell out very very very fast. Limit of ONE per customer. NO Exceptions! Orders of more than ONE upper will be canceled. Thank you. , $475.00 Read more about this product Bravo Company USA, Inc.http://www.bravocompanyusa.com/ I had a small coronary thinking I missed the middies!!! |
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I just don't know why? Last nights email notifications went out at exactly 8pm CST. If you got your email quickly after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? If you got your email a long time after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? Perhaps you should divert some of your Advertising/PR budget to eCommerce solutions which would improve your ordering system? I rec'd two emails, to two different email accounts (Gmail and .mil) at 9:15:29 PM EDT and 9:31:11 PM EDT, respectively. A friend rec'd his (at his Yahoo account) at 9:40 PM EDT. I know for a fact that he signed up for the email notification many days or weeks after I signed up for mine. I surmise that your system is sending the emails out in order which they were entered into your system, and thus anyone who signs up later in the pecking order is automatically at a disadvantage over those who signed up earlier. Again, your system is flawed, and I encourage you to rectify it, as you produce a fine product, and have otherwise good customer service. Don’t come to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. It will bite you in the ass every time. As a practice, I enter in my personal emails (one from Road Runner, and one from Gmail) about 60 seconds before we are about to turn on the BCM products. I have always done this, just to confirm emails do actually go out. I got both email notifications (on average) about 5 minutes after the product is turned on. So your conclusion is not correct. |
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Don’t come to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. It will bite you in the ass every time. As a practice, I enter in my personal emails (one from Road Runner, and one from Gmail) about 60 seconds before we are about to turn on the BCM products. I have always done this, just to confirm emails do actually go out. I got both email notifications (on average) about 5 minutes after the product is turned on. So your conclusion is not correct. Thank you for the data point. I am very willing to accept a theory mine being disproved. Any other ideas on why some emails aren't received until much later? |
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Don’t come to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. It will bite you in the ass every time. As a practice, I enter in my personal emails (one from Road Runner, and one from Gmail) about 60 seconds before we are about to turn on the BCM products. I have always done this, just to confirm emails do actually go out. I got both email notifications (on average) about 5 minutes after the product is turned on. So your conclusion is not correct. Thank you for the data point. I am very willing to accept a theory mine being disproved. Any other ideas on why some emails aren't received until much later? I just don't have a clue ? A real IT guy who understands how email providers route and manage email may be able to offer some insite. I am just hoping we see a trend of folks who used a certain type of email provider received it quickly and other email provider consistantly delivered the message much later. |
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I use Gmail and AT&T text message to get the alerts.
Gmail has been within 3-5 minutes notification. AT&T has been 15-20 minutes later. I was fortunate to be able to order a LMT 10.5 upper, BCM Mid Length upper, and BCM 16" M4 due to the email notifications. Now if I can get lucky enough to get a LMT or BCM bcg then I will be good to go. I think the email notification is as fair as it gets in today's market. Bravo Company has EARNED my business and will continue to receive my business. THANKS Bravo for a fair practice, more than fair prices, and an EXCEPTIONAL product. Keep up the fantastic work. 
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Don’t come to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. It will bite you in the ass every time. As a practice, I enter in my personal emails (one from Road Runner, and one from Gmail) about 60 seconds before we are about to turn on the BCM products. I have always done this, just to confirm emails do actually go out. I got both email notifications (on average) about 5 minutes after the product is turned on. So your conclusion is not correct. Thank you for the data point. I am very willing to accept a theory mine being disproved. Any other ideas on why some emails aren't received until much later? I received the e-mail on my yahoo account about 8:38 CST. I received it at 8:09 CST on my work e-mail. I suspect yahoo and other mail servers security software my have thought the mass e-mail my have been spam or some type of service attack. |
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fwiw, most of the time email is pretty quick as you all know, but if you are sending out mass, mass emails, servers all around are looking up their "what do i do w/ this many incoming emails from the same address" scripts and some may trigger a alert to personnel that are running the incoming servers, thus putting a human in the chain to slow it all down. the incoming servers/routers would have to verify it is not a attack and many other things like looking at a known spammer/blacklist list. then the server email is getting back all kinds of data too. normally this isn't a big deal but if you are dealing w/ possibly hundreds of thousands of emails in a matter of a few minutes, things will get slowed down as bottlenecks/slowdowns are all over the place throughout the many electronic highways that an email goes through to get to your client. the only time this becomes apparent is when you are trying to get a quick email to get in on a deal, otherwise a 10-30min delay in an email is no big deal. bcm - about the only thing you could do is ask whoever is hosting your email server if they they limit x amount per second, other than that sometimes this stuff takes a bit of time depending on how big the list is. also, bcm - just out of curiosity, how many emails are you sending out? and one last fwiw, i have always got my email alerts when stuff was in stock and that is using gmail, so who knows, maybe i am just lucky. |
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BCM stuff usually stays in stock for about a half hour (give or take). Some folks get their email notifications well into the sale or after the batch is sold out. I do not know exactly why that happens. Here is what I do know. **The email notifications all go out at the same time. **The email lists are absolutely HUGE HUGE HUGE. Take a look at our advertising. We have the inside cover on every single tactical publication in the United States. I would guess we have one of the biggest advertising budget in the black rifle industry. So any type of hard to find stuff from any manufacturer sells out immediately. **The email notifications are automatically triggered when the website is updated with inventory. I can not send them out early, send them out late, or not send them out. **When the products are placed in stock (and emails are sent out), within 120 seconds I am getting many system delivery failures (from emails with typos in them), and many many many email notifications of orders being placed on the website. So many many folks are getting the emails very quickly. I just don't know why? Last nights email notifications went out at exactly 8pm CST. If you got your email quickly after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? If you got your email a long time after 8pm CST, what type of email service did you have ? Paul, The huge number of e-mails may just be the problem. Maybe the website developer can work with you on a fix or a solution.. |
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I am just hoping we see a trend of folks who used a certain type of email provider received it quickly and other email provider consistantly delivered the message much later. I used my Gmail and didn't get it until 9:39pm EST - clicked immediately and was already sold out |
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Hit my hotmail @ 9:47 est (8:47) CST Can we start back ordering yet?????please apparently-I never had a snowballs chance Subscribe to the thread that has the upper you want in it, you'll get the notification well before the product goes on the site and that should be enough of a lag time to put you on their site just in time to see it in stock.
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I received the email in my spam folder at 8:14CST, which I didn't see for a few hours...
Content analysis details: (6.7 points, 6.0 required) pts rule name description –––– –––––––––––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 0.0 MISSING_MID Missing Message-Id: header 0.9 SARE_MLH_Stock1 Subject mentions stock or stock related words 0.7 SPF_SOFTFAIL SPF: sender does not match SPF record (softfail) 1.5 HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_28 BODY: HTML: images with 2400-2800 bytes of words 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message 1.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts 1.8 MIME_QP_LONG_LINE RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 chars |
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I run my own email server and am the sysadmin type, so if you'd like some help, I'd be happy to help out.
BlitzK posted some useful information. The most disturbing element is the SPF Softfail –– basically this means that there are records published for your email out domain (checking the last product email I got, this is [email protected]) that say that mail for users at wi.rr.com is only sent through a certain number of servers –– and your server isn't one of them. It's a "soft" fail which means the policy is still testing and therefore emails shouldnt be rejected on that basis alone, but obviously that is counting against you. The others are various factors that occur more often in SPAM emails than in good emails (I'll research the specific ones more, but I suspect it's due to the styling of the message), but there are enough of them that it added up. If you let me know when you're going to have a message going out, I can sign up for it & have my mail server watch for it and see /exactly/ when your mail server tries to contact it. That would also give me more information to go on. *Edit* looked at it a little more. Looks like whatever software you're using to make the mass-mails kinda sucks :-/ Basically, it claims it's sending emails in a format that says only 76 characters will be printed on each line, but then actually puts more (this regulars as a tick against you). Also, the emails you're sending are html only –– they have no accompanying plaintext only part for people who don't have HTML email. A decent mailing program should be able to include both. If you fixed both of those things, that would reduce your likelyhood of hitting the spam folder dramatically (those two alone account for half the spam points against you via my system setup). Also, the message has no message-id, which is a big nono (any decent mailer should include one, it's required by standards). Of course, these are mostly things that will result in having your email put into a spamfolder, not necessarily things that will get it delayed. I need to know a little more about your outgoing system before I can speculate on that. Tom |
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If you let me know when you're going to have a message going out, I can sign up for it & have my mail server watch for it and see /exactly/ when your mail server tries to contact it. That would also give me more information to go on. Tom Yeah, let me know too so I can help test your e-mail notification! 
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If you let me know when you're going to have a message going out, I can sign up for it & have my mail server watch for it and see /exactly/ when your mail server tries to contact it. That would also give me more information to go on. Tom Yeah, let me know too so I can help test your e-mail notification! Haha I didn't even think of that aspect of it =P You could probably make a fake product not in the regular menu to use for testing if you wanted or something like that ;) |
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Hell, I got the email at 9:03 EST, and that's with AOL. Go figure.
Anyway, Paul. Don't mind the naysayers, they're mainly pissed because they missed it. God knows I've missed my share. I've been dealing with you for almost six years now, and have never been less than satisfied. I think what many people are forgetting (which you mentioned in your other post) is that this is a hellacious time to try to buy ANY firearms related item. Not only are gun owners panic buying, but people who have never owned a gun are buying things up because they a) are afraid of SHTF in the event of total economic collapse and b) feel that if they don't get something now, they'll never be able to get it if Obama bans things. Combine that with the fact that there aren't that many manufacturers who make a product of known high quality (Colt, LMT, BCM, Sabre) and you end up with insanely high demand with insanely limited supply. |
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Don’t come to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. It will bite you in the ass every time. As a practice, I enter in my personal emails (one from Road Runner, and one from Gmail) about 60 seconds before we are about to turn on the BCM products. I have always done this, just to confirm emails do actually go out. I got both email notifications (on average) about 5 minutes after the product is turned on. So your conclusion is not correct. Thank you for the data point. I am very willing to accept a theory mine being disproved. Any other ideas on why some emails aren't received until much later? You got your first one 15 min after the email notification went out. How much faster could it get? |