Where is Kaito?
Sun 2009/09/27 03:15 JST
So, last year, the date is 5th November 2008. I placed an oreder for my Kito Nendoroid over at playasia.com and he was schedualed for a Feb 09 release.
Now to this day, I still do NOT have Kaito. As of yet play asia have NEVER got their stock in. Everytime I email them, they basically say 'we will try to get stock, but maybe not'.
He was supposed to be my first nendoroid, but I now have 4 with more on the way. I still want to get a Kaito nendoroid, but don't want to pay £80 like eBay is charging, but the problem is, I can't find Kaito anywhere!
So please, does anyone know any stores online that still have him for sale? I'd prefer to pay retail price, but will pay more if needed, I just really need to find him >.<
That highlights an important lesson of only doing your preorders from respectable stores Hobby Search or Hobby Link Japan.
(I used to use the latter most of the time, but due to their stupid shipping policy where you cannot combine preorder items that are ordered more than 2 months in advance and their unwilingness to fix it I switched entirely to Hobby Search now and cannot be happier, even though they overcharge a little bit for shipping, you can recombine orders to your heart contest (which is pretty important since figures are often delayed anyway) and save big on combined shipping. And as an added bonus they have something called points where you supposedly get 5% savings towards future purchases (kind of like hlj early bird discount, though without any time-constraints).
I have brought from playasia.com many times for figures and video games and I've never had a problem with them. I had always found them to be great value, fast shipping, well p[acked and very efficient overall to deal with. As such, I had no hang ups about putting my pre order for Kaito for them.
At the time I pre ordered, hlj didn't have him listed yet and hobby search I can never use because you can't calculate item costs on items because they dont display shipping costs in the order forms, it goes as an additional cost later on which I do not like.
Typically the overseas shipping costs are pertty uniform anyway and depend on weight. Nendoroid is not going to break 1 kg barrier of EMS weight limit anyway and as such for such smaller items shipping is constant unless you combine several ones.
Besides next to nobody allows you to calculate shipping costs before item weight is known.
And even then e.g. HLJ's estimates are significantly off for my destination.
I think you try to say something interesting, but the message is a bit lost in this text since it's a bit hard to read. It's one big chunk of text, the sentences are rather long (more than 3 lines!) and you use () quite a lot for long messages. To make it even worse you have one more ( than ), which on it's own makes it tricky and indicates you even lost track of the text yourself while writing :P
I'm not trying to flame your writing skills (most people screw up once in a while) but if you want people to read and understand what you write, then it's not just a matter of what you write, but also how.
A few basic rules for writing:
- make sentences short enough for people to remember the start when they reach the end. If the topic change a lot from one end to the other one, maybe it should be more than one sentence.
- Avoid using () unless it's a short note. Imagine that you tell the computer to hide all () with their contents and you should still be able to read the sentence.
- Consider newlines once in a while as a huge chunk of text is less inviting to read
I know I may sound like a teacher or something, but I think of it as a help. When I reached the end of your text and went "what did he say?" and had to reread it (some parts several times) in order to understand it, then the text failed and the readers will skip it. Being ignored is no fun -_^
Thanks for the feedback.
I just find it hard to write in this simple style of "Jack wore a hat. The hat was brown. Brown hats are brown." (to borrow a recent example I saw).
Perhaps this is because in my native language longer sentences make perfect sense.
Hey, at least it's not German where they just glue tons of words together. ;)
That's bad too as the sentences becomes so short that they fail to tell the point. There is a golden middle way ^^
I would have had an easier time reading what you wrote in perfectly structured German :P
(and no, I'm not German. It's actually a foreign language to me, just like English is)
This is one reason why I don't like preordering. Even ordering out of stock items can be an issue. If you preorder in a store and it declares itself bankrupt before you get your goods, then you have an issue. You go to the bank and sign a declaration that they substracted money, but never sent the goods. However you have to do this "within reasonable time", which means next is is likely too late and the money can be lost.
You were certainly having a wild new years eve party. You fell asleep in 2005 and woke up in 2009 ^^
lol, I meant 2008 XD will edit.
It's impossible to get a Kaito now unless you go on Ebay or some other site where other collectors are willing to sell their Kaito, as far as I know after the first run GSC discontinued Kaito
This is the part I don't get about marketing. You spend a fortune developing the product, set up an assembly line to make the product and then you produce less than the demand on the market.
Let's make an example (numbers are made up. It's only for illustration)
You decide to sell your product for $10 each.
Production costs are $2 which means you will get a profit of $8/unit
Development costs $40.000
You produce 8000 units
The profit from the first 5000 will cover the development costs ($8*5000 = $40.000)
Your profit is $24k ($8*3.000 = $24.000)
You could have sold an additional 5000 units, which means you cheated yourself for an additional profit of $8*5000=$40.000
Can somebody explain why it's good business not to cover the demand?
Consider that the additional production runs certainly must be of a certain size.
If the additional run size is e.g. 10000 units, it changes things.
If only 5000 are sold, you have another 5000 sitting in the inventory somewhere (== wasting money on storage) or weighting on the prices on the market forcing them downwards. And if you do that, retails would hate you and it would be harder to set higher prices in the future too.
Besides we don't really know what sort of a demand is left for Kaito currently. It well could be that only a handful of people missed on him from those who would agree to pay the full price.
This is both right and wrong. Naturally it's a gamble on how many will buy your product. However the whole concept of preordering should be to tell them how many they should produce. There is something messed up if people fail to get the product even if they preordered. And here is the concept I don't get: why do they not even always cover preorders?
Might have something to do with some people doing their preorders too late.
Besides, how many examples of people doing preorders and not getting their stuff we see?
Only a handful I would say.
And given that there are people who get this without preorders to, I would say the system works pretty close to what it should be.
After all it is better to underproduce a tiny bit than to overproduce (in my opinion anyway).
No, at least not always. Sometimes preorders exceeds the planned production count while production is still in progress, yet they will not produce more. Sometimes they even expects not to cover the demand even before taking preorders in order to make it exclusive. Sure it's nice to have an exclusive product, but wouldn't it result in higher profit to cover the demand?
I still don't get the business model where the demand isn't covered. The theory of free market is if there is a demand, somebody will supply, but it's just not working that way.
Don't forget printer-schedule.
Sometimes a printer can't cover excess demands before a serious span of time passes, especially just before major events.
I never understood as well; if the first batch is sold like hot cakes and there's obviously demand for more, why not re-release them? the only ones who are making a huge profit by not giving in to the demand are those ebay/online sellers offering them for twice or thrice the price.
Then again maybe they want to spend that money making new figures? I don't get it either.
If you decide to spend say $200 on figures, then their goal would be to sell for $200 at the lowest production and development costs, not to make a diverse selection. If you is "foolish" enough to buy the same one as everybody else where the development is covered, yet you want to pay like you should cover development, then it would result in higher profit when you pay your $200.
That's why it baffles me when they don't re-release very popular figures, I wish there was anything I could do as a consumer, asides trying to grab it the first time (which isn't possible sometimes).
My guess is that it's done to force the consumer(us) to make an impulse buy, knowing that our chances of getting one may never come again. Therefore, figures that may not be popular, will still be pre-ordered,because we are worried that it will be unobtainable in the future. That, or figure companies are really evil hamsters destined to take over the world.
Of course, some are re-released and re-made. Miku has been re-released about a billion times.
I haven't seen Kaito available - haven't been looking, but I'm certain when I went to Japan earlier this year I didn't see him then. Strange that some Nendoroids are more common than others - do GSC produce different amounts, even on first runs?
Haha, wow, that's horrible!! I don't know what to tell you, I guess just try to cancel with them and if they give you a big deal just be like, "UM, REALLY?"
Play Asia seems like those stores that are decent, but not 100% great. By this point having Kaito will be VERY HARD. If you didn't send any payment for him, just cancel the order and look for him elsewhere; I'm also looking for him but is so hard ;_;
its not so easy to get kaito now.. he's becoming a rare non-exclusive nendoroid~
lots of store here at my place didn't bring him in.. lucky i hv a fren having 2 kaito..
and he's willing to let go 1 to me.. ^ ^
Gaah I ve been looking fo rhim too.I knew I should have pre ordered him when I had the chance.Im also looking for itoshiki-sensei but he's also sold out everywhere.T_T
I had the same problem except it was with Toyslogic. :/ I'm hoping they'll re-release him. He was the first nendoroid I was looking forward to this year. I'm definitely not spending $100+ on him though like some people are.
Hope that you manage to find him, been looking for him as well TwT *using local suppliers**
I've been looking for him too =/