Dear /r/mk,

You may not realize it with all the awesome Minivan posts here, but for many of the group buy members, the Minivan keyboard has now been delayed 3 times, and some of us still don’t know when it will be shipped. MD’s communication has not been adequate during this process.

In more detail, the Minivan drop had an original estimated ship date of 12/9/2016. They were on target for this as of 11/18. This means that MD anticipated having received the bulk order from their vendor before this date, and would have enough time to ship them out by 12/9.

On 12/2, we got an update that the drop had not been shipped from the vendor:

We have a call scheduled next week and should get a bit more visibility in regards to when we can expect these in our warehouse.”

MD knew there was going to be a delay, as they later stated that it takes a little over a week for the bulk shipment to arrive after being shipped from the vendor. Yet they didn’t let anyone know about the delay at this point, and they should have done so.

On 12/9 Massdrop told us the bulk order had been shipped, and that the estimated ship date from their own warehouse was now 12/16.

On 12/21:

Due to the holiday season, our vendor’s carrier was not able to ship out the groups order in its entirety. The vendor is expecting to have the remaining keyboards sent out from their location by the end of the week.

And today (1/5):

While the group's order is on its way to our warehouse in New Jersey now, we've just learned that a minor shipping error has prevented the shipment from arriving as originally anticipated.

Note that this shipping is later than their previous estimate of “by the end of the week” [of 12/21], a third delay.

I’ll give MD the benefit of the doubt that they had no control over the delays, in which case. Here are my issues:

1. MD knew there would likely be a first delay on 12/2, and didn’t let us know so in their update.
2. MD could have done inventory of the parts of the bulk order that was shipped to them, and determined who was getting their Minivan and who wasn’t. I would have greatly appreciated knowing I was in the second delay before christmas, as it affected where I had the keyboard shipped. This was not done
3. MD has now let us know of the 3rd delay, with very vague details. The bulk order has shipped but there was a shipping error? What does that mean?
4. Many users have been asking questions for the logistics team on the discussion page, and MD hasn’t responded to any of them.
   1. Also, as nice as customer support was when responding to my ticket, they don’t know anything more than we do from the logistics team’s updates.

I understand that the holidays can cause delays, and can cause the logistics team at MD to be overloaded. But the holidays are well over now, why is MD communication still so lackluster?

From what we can tell, most users that are delayed this far (including myself) opted to get laser engraved black put keycaps. I’m interested to know if anyone else has been delayed who didn’t have these keycaps.

Just wanted to vent some frustration, and give redditors some insight into issues with MD to become better informed buyers.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m not too annoyed with MD. I ended up getting one of the mass drop custom sennheiser hd 6xx as a gift on Christmas and they’re really great!

EDIT: A shoutout to /u/MassdropYanbo is in order. They are actually reading this thread, the discussion thread on MD and gave a personalized response today. They're not even on logistics! https://www.massdrop.com/buy/minivan-keyboard/talk/624574

-Apprentice57