Why Our New Puzzles Sometimes Show Up On Amazon First

A customer asks, "Why I often found out your new released puzzles on Amazon a few days earlier than on your website?"

This happens because we hire Amazon's warehouses to fulfill many of our orders. That is,

1. We make each puzzle in batches, then we send a batch of that puzzles to Amazon's warehouse.
2. When people buy our puzzles either on Amazon, or on our website, the order is sent to the same Amazon-run warehouse.
3. The good folks at Amazon's warehouse pick your order off their shelves and send it to you.

That is, whether you order from amazon or from this website, everything happens basically the same. 

But, when we send 100 puzzles to Amazon, they don't scan all 100 in at once.  They'll scan in 10, then not scan in the rest until 3 days later, or whatever.  This drives us crazy, and it's the key to the topic of this blog post. 

If we announced the puzzle was in-stock on our website when, say there were are only 5 scanned-in, then our back-in-stock emails will go out, but people will come to the website and those 5 will have sold out, and that's annoying. The rest will get scanned into stock in the next couple of days, but they don't know that.

So we set-up our website to only announce a puzzle is in-stock once most of the batch is already scanned into the warehouse, ready to ship to you.

In contrast, Amazon starts selling those puzzles on amazon.com as soon as it scans in any of them, but sometimes with far-out ship dates - so you might be able to buy it earlier on amazon.com, but it might not actually ship any earlier to you. 

There are other pros and cons to buying our puzzles on amazon.com rather than on this website.

Pros to buying our puzzles on amazon:

• you get Prime free 2-day-ish shipping if you have Prime
• you can get gift wrap and gift messages
• you can order other stuff from Amazon at the same time
• you might be able to order our puzzles a few days before they show up here

Cons to buying our puzzles on amazon:

• lower prices on our website
• free standard shipping on $35 or more
• you get to vote on new puzzle images (survey pops up on the order confirmation page)
• you can sign up for our email Gazette, with contests and specials (see link on the order confirmation page)

Last note: A few of our puzzles are only available on this website. That's because for the last year we tried using a different warehouse to fulfill our orders, so the inventory wasn't in the amazon warehouse, so amazon can't sell those puzzles.  But that different warehouse wasn't any better than Amazon, and sending our inventory to two different warehouses was inefficient, so we have gone back to routing all our inventory through Amazon's warehouses, taking advantage of their awesome robots and optimized distribution and shipping network.