-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
LDCRS vs Tesla Shields Floor Mats
- Thread starter MiStR_StEvO
- Start date
A business model similar to Jeda - sell a product for which no stock exists and collect the money upfront and then make excuses and apologize when orders don't arrive.
whisperingshad
Active Member
That is how a pre-order works. Kickstarter is based off this 100%
Yeah, but with Kickstarter you typically get the lowest price early on to compensate for the risk of uncertainty!
![angus[Y]oung](/tmc/data/avatars/l/141/141264.jpg?1620160343){kind=avatar}
angus[Y]oung
Active Member
Unfortunately not. The original phase 1 pre orders are more expensive than the latest phase 2 pre-orders, so early order placements cost more. Now they are offering a "voucher" to phase 1 pre orders which basically means you have to spend even more to get the price that is currently on offer.
angus[Y]oung
Active Member
@Wabsa sorry I had only skimmed as we ended up choosing a different product for our mats but I still monitor the thread out of interest (i.e. I was outvoted by a score of 1 to 1 on the purchase decision, lol).
I don't understand their pricing model either. I ordered on May 7 - web site said "in stock" and I paid $149.99 ($142.50 after a 5% discount). Since there is no stock I guess my order was really a "pre-order". They are still advertising and taking pre-orders but at the same time saying "in stock" and "Hurry! Only 199 units left in stock!"- how do they have stock but are not shipping to customers? They are still projecting delivery to customers the middle of June. Since they are waiting on a ship to arrive in LA from China, clearing customs, shipment to Salt Lake City, then re-packaging and shipment to customers, I see a July 4th surprise. Another case of "over promise, under deliver". Guess all I can do is wait and see.
Teslashields guy #2 here,
I just saw this thread!
I see a lot of confusion about what's going on, and there are a ton of fair points.
Here's a bit of history on what happened with us to help explain the confusion:
Jason and I started the company originally on amazon and it was meant to just be an amazon business primarily since neither of us did shopify stuff before, we didn't have a warehouse or advertising experience. We were doing fine, but nothing crazy.
A 3rd party who is friends with Jason's dad came up to us (let's call him "THE WEBSITE GUY" it wasn't just 1 guy, he had a little firm but that's not the point) and proposed us a "deal". He would do our website and advertising for a percentage of sales and to cover any expenses he had (within a budget) at the end of a 12 month contract (starting once the website was "operational). A basically Pro-bono(?) deal. We didn't have any money to do a site ourselves, so it was hard to turn down such an offer. Despite the fanfare from Jason and his dad, I wasn't exactly thrilled at having a 1 year contract with an unknown (to me) party due to past experience in business. However, Jason assured me that he was an "Expert" and was working in our best interest due to the bond this has with Jason's dad, so we agreed, and a website was designed by this person (late 2019, early 2020).
During the pandemic, I lowered our prices on amazon to around $90-ish and noticed a huge spike in sales a few weeks later. Jason found a youtube review about us and how great a value we had at ~$99 and I decided a pre-order/retail hybrid approach would allow us to give our customers the best deal for our products, expand our reputation with the community and optimize our production system for economies of scale. On amazon, this price point just isn't feasible due to the costs of getting mats into and out of that system, so I concluded that the only option would be to do this on a dedicated website with pre orders (if the product is already sold before it arrives to us, we could cut fixed costs dramatically and increase the production value of the money we already had due to efficiencies of larger orders). Amazon would then just be one of our retail channels and the website would be our exclusive preorder site with our own retail portion as well. It's a win-win for everybody as it really cut down our total operating and advertising costs by around 50% vs just using amazon!
We told the website guy about this idea on our site, using the discounted early order idea used by sites like massdrop, etc and he liked the overall concept. However, he apparently did NOT agree with offering lower prices on preorders and a few other things, intentionally delaying the "preorder system" he was developing and other excuses. He'd make appeals to Jason through his father and would constantly play with prices, saying things like "If it's selling at $149.99, why lower it?! Why would you hurt our profits?". Jason generally sided with website guy because what could he do? His dad and the website guy go back a while and it's hard to fight against his dad, a "free", "expert" website and advertising.
Organizational structure:
I do production and back end financial modeling and projections, etc. The nitty gritty stuff.
Website guy did the website and paid advertising.
Jason does marketing and customer service based on what website guy was doing on his end, and Jason would relay to me whatever was going on for me to ensure it made sense with what I was doing.
Jason's father owns a portion of Jason's share of the company to provide financial guidance on any large investments he makes and we all have to approve on an investment together.
This can be a huge telephone game. Literally. Website guy was only answering phone calls when he felt like it. The website was slow to get updated, coding issues, pricing issues, all kinds of mess. Jason could hardly reach him without his dad stepping in to get some sort of call back most of the time. Website guy NEVER answered calls or texts from me. Pretty sure he hates me. Oh well!
Poor Jason was kinda stuck with trying to keep things coherent with his marketing, customer service, etc efforts. Website guy would say certain dates on advertising or the site and Jason would call me saying "hey is it really x date?" and I would go "WHAT?" and have to call WsG and tell him his dates were off or he made a mistake and it was a whole issue. Jason had no idea what dates or numbers to quote half the time because he was getting different information from each of us, which put him into an anxiety overdrive while dealing with college. Jason did overpromise a lot, and I should have been more careful about explaining how the production process works because that is a really important thing, but he's sure learning fast!
One perfect example comes to mind: Since Jason's dad needs to approve on larger investments (such as ordering 1000 mats), we had to delay the start of production a few weeks for me to develop and show a very very very conservative proforma of what would happen with that money in order for him to give his blessings. That's fine and prudent in such business matters, but Jason didn't know that it would take 2 weeks to approve the proforma and wire funds to our factory. He assumed I could just bang out a 4 page model and sensitivity analysis from scratch overnight on a friday, and that it would instantly be reviewed and approved without changes by monday. That caused a marketing issue for him.
Remember, I am over here developing the product, organizing the production schedules, infrastructure, checking samples and developing our business and financial models to make sure everything was solid. I do not have the bandwidth to micromanage Jason or the website. If Website guy is all over the place with pricing and promotions, making it hard for me to get a solid overview of our sales, costs and profitability and Jason's trying to keep people happy with customer service, answering calls and/or emails at all hours of the day, there will be overlaps in some areas that caused problems.
If anyone has been paying attention to our site, there has been a lot of "stuff" going on with it. Products going up and down, prices all over the place, etc. We're trying to take over the site but at the same time, the website guy has been "fixing" stuff for us here with and without my approval. Around late April, I made a bunch of changes to the site that I thought were great, but since it technically still fell under this guy's authority for another week, he basically removed everything I did and "put it back to normal" which really sealed the deal for me. His contract with us recently ended, and we've decided not to renew his services (shocked pika). We've been slowly taking over all the aspects of what he managed either personally or by hiring 3rd parties to help us handle the new responsibility. The website he left us is in rough shape coding-wise. Right now, we're using fiverr people for random issues here and there.
So that's the story about why things got so weird with us. Now that we're in full control, the site is going to finally achieve our original intentions... once we figure out how to use the damn thing.
P.S If anyone knows someone that could help us out with getting our website to the next level, let me know! We're looking hopefully for a long term partner in developing our site out. PM ME!
I just saw this thread!
I see a lot of confusion about what's going on, and there are a ton of fair points.
Here's a bit of history on what happened with us to help explain the confusion:
Jason and I started the company originally on amazon and it was meant to just be an amazon business primarily since neither of us did shopify stuff before, we didn't have a warehouse or advertising experience. We were doing fine, but nothing crazy.
A 3rd party who is friends with Jason's dad came up to us (let's call him "THE WEBSITE GUY" it wasn't just 1 guy, he had a little firm but that's not the point) and proposed us a "deal". He would do our website and advertising for a percentage of sales and to cover any expenses he had (within a budget) at the end of a 12 month contract (starting once the website was "operational). A basically Pro-bono(?) deal. We didn't have any money to do a site ourselves, so it was hard to turn down such an offer. Despite the fanfare from Jason and his dad, I wasn't exactly thrilled at having a 1 year contract with an unknown (to me) party due to past experience in business. However, Jason assured me that he was an "Expert" and was working in our best interest due to the bond this has with Jason's dad, so we agreed, and a website was designed by this person (late 2019, early 2020).
During the pandemic, I lowered our prices on amazon to around $90-ish and noticed a huge spike in sales a few weeks later. Jason found a youtube review about us and how great a value we had at ~$99 and I decided a pre-order/retail hybrid approach would allow us to give our customers the best deal for our products, expand our reputation with the community and optimize our production system for economies of scale. On amazon, this price point just isn't feasible due to the costs of getting mats into and out of that system, so I concluded that the only option would be to do this on a dedicated website with pre orders (if the product is already sold before it arrives to us, we could cut fixed costs dramatically and increase the production value of the money we already had due to efficiencies of larger orders). Amazon would then just be one of our retail channels and the website would be our exclusive preorder site with our own retail portion as well. It's a win-win for everybody as it really cut down our total operating and advertising costs by around 50% vs just using amazon!
We told the website guy about this idea on our site, using the discounted early order idea used by sites like massdrop, etc and he liked the overall concept. However, he apparently did NOT agree with offering lower prices on preorders and a few other things, intentionally delaying the "preorder system" he was developing and other excuses. He'd make appeals to Jason through his father and would constantly play with prices, saying things like "If it's selling at $149.99, why lower it?! Why would you hurt our profits?". Jason generally sided with website guy because what could he do? His dad and the website guy go back a while and it's hard to fight against his dad, a "free", "expert" website and advertising.
Organizational structure:
I do production and back end financial modeling and projections, etc. The nitty gritty stuff.
Website guy did the website and paid advertising.
Jason does marketing and customer service based on what website guy was doing on his end, and Jason would relay to me whatever was going on for me to ensure it made sense with what I was doing.
Jason's father owns a portion of Jason's share of the company to provide financial guidance on any large investments he makes and we all have to approve on an investment together.
This can be a huge telephone game. Literally. Website guy was only answering phone calls when he felt like it. The website was slow to get updated, coding issues, pricing issues, all kinds of mess. Jason could hardly reach him without his dad stepping in to get some sort of call back most of the time. Website guy NEVER answered calls or texts from me. Pretty sure he hates me. Oh well!
Poor Jason was kinda stuck with trying to keep things coherent with his marketing, customer service, etc efforts. Website guy would say certain dates on advertising or the site and Jason would call me saying "hey is it really x date?" and I would go "WHAT?" and have to call WsG and tell him his dates were off or he made a mistake and it was a whole issue. Jason had no idea what dates or numbers to quote half the time because he was getting different information from each of us, which put him into an anxiety overdrive while dealing with college. Jason did overpromise a lot, and I should have been more careful about explaining how the production process works because that is a really important thing, but he's sure learning fast!
One perfect example comes to mind: Since Jason's dad needs to approve on larger investments (such as ordering 1000 mats), we had to delay the start of production a few weeks for me to develop and show a very very very conservative proforma of what would happen with that money in order for him to give his blessings. That's fine and prudent in such business matters, but Jason didn't know that it would take 2 weeks to approve the proforma and wire funds to our factory. He assumed I could just bang out a 4 page model and sensitivity analysis from scratch overnight on a friday, and that it would instantly be reviewed and approved without changes by monday. That caused a marketing issue for him.
Remember, I am over here developing the product, organizing the production schedules, infrastructure, checking samples and developing our business and financial models to make sure everything was solid. I do not have the bandwidth to micromanage Jason or the website. If Website guy is all over the place with pricing and promotions, making it hard for me to get a solid overview of our sales, costs and profitability and Jason's trying to keep people happy with customer service, answering calls and/or emails at all hours of the day, there will be overlaps in some areas that caused problems.
If anyone has been paying attention to our site, there has been a lot of "stuff" going on with it. Products going up and down, prices all over the place, etc. We're trying to take over the site but at the same time, the website guy has been "fixing" stuff for us here with and without my approval. Around late April, I made a bunch of changes to the site that I thought were great, but since it technically still fell under this guy's authority for another week, he basically removed everything I did and "put it back to normal" which really sealed the deal for me. His contract with us recently ended, and we've decided not to renew his services (shocked pika). We've been slowly taking over all the aspects of what he managed either personally or by hiring 3rd parties to help us handle the new responsibility. The website he left us is in rough shape coding-wise. Right now, we're using fiverr people for random issues here and there.
So that's the story about why things got so weird with us. Now that we're in full control, the site is going to finally achieve our original intentions... once we figure out how to use the damn thing.
P.S If anyone knows someone that could help us out with getting our website to the next level, let me know! We're looking hopefully for a long term partner in developing our site out. PM ME!
Last edited:
So.. this is an issue I've been having for a bit.
The IDEA here was to set up a limited-stock pre-order once a quarter, where people could buy at the cheapest price for the best value. Since we instituted a fixed time line for pricing on pre orders based on where the order is in production, it makes things 10x more complex but fair. If we are going to produce 500 mats, we want to pre-sell like 200 or 300 of them before the mats arrive in our warehouses and the rest would go to amazon and retail customers who want a mat in a few days vs a few months. Website guy's code doesn't allow for this, so he just slapped this up for us and it's majorly confusing. We can't even do variations of a product without breaking the site and our add-ons. It's a real big annoyance and we're looking to fix it asap.
Last edited:
We offer the voucher but we also offer full or partial refunds, I made sure to have reserves for this potential issue knowing what was going on with the website. It might be annoying to Jason to go through all that, but it's only fair to you all. Obviously, it sucks for us to have cash leaving our account when we could be using it for growth, but it's still YOUR money until the product arrives and I have no issue with you getting a fair deal. Please be aware, however, that the preorder price of $99 is based on pre-production pricing. If you ordered the phase 1 preorder after production started, it would be based on whatever pricing is set for that phase of production. It's confusing, but again, it's fair.
Yes, this is the idea I am championing and was being kind of bastardized by our website controller but getting fixed now that we have full power.
Great story - more than I want to know or need to know. I'll reserve my final opinions until I receive the mats.
You do not want to be known as a company where excuses + no results = results.
You do not want to be known as a company where excuses + no results = results.
Sorry for keeping you informed about the situation by taking time out to provide as detailed information I could?
I guess you want us to be the company that doesn't tell anyone anything for weeks about what's going on and hides behind canned responses like a kickstarter company or something?
I am not a marketing guy. I am the guy who has up-to-date information on what's going on with our product and schedules.
Everytime I come on here, I lay out everything on the table in the pursuit of total transparency. Most of the issues we've had is easily summed up by "Jason messed up relaying information accurately by being too quick to jump on information that hasn't been confirmed" and that is to be kind of expected for an overworked college kid who isn't experienced in these things. I am not covering for him either, he's made a lot of rookie mistakes and I have chewed him out for it so much that he probably gets a panic attack if he sees me calling him at 10pm after he posts anything.
I come in and clarify misunderstandings when I see something Jason posts incorrectly ASAP because usually, the data itself is correct (such as a date) but the way he words that data is wrong (such as shipping vs receiving) and is a HUGE PROBLEM. As far as I am aware, the only real delay we had in our production schedule on my end since the deposit was made was our factory closing for holiday before finishing the order as expected. It was a 5 day delay roughly.
If you want specific data, here is the cargo ship our product is being loaded on:
CMA CGM VALENCIA, Container Ship - Details and current position - IMO 9322358 - VesselFinder
Vessel CMA CGM VALENCIA (IMO 9322358, MMSI 256590000) is a Container Ship built in 2007 and currently sailing under the flag of Malta.
I can also provide a BOL if you want to see it.
For all intents and purposes, if I do not confirm something said by Jason, it is not actionable.
Email me at [email protected] any time you want if you need me to confirm something.
Last edited:
angus[Y]oung
Active Member
Hey guys! It’s Jason here! I want to let everyone know that we have just received our final samples and would like to share what the 2021 Model y revised seat mounts mats look like!
Attachments
tempest2001
Member
I took the plunge and placed the order for the 7 seater mat and preorder the trunk/frunk mat for later delivery shows 5 weeks or whatever. Hopefully I didn't make a mistake reading some of the other people's complaint here.
Last edited:
You are adventuresome. Their website says the mats are "in stock" and "only 212 units left" so you should get them soon ("end of May" - tomorrow?) except for the 3rd row piece which they are saying will be a Q3 shipment. Let us know how this all works out.
tempest2001
Member
Absolutely, hope it works out! I'll report back on the findings once received/not received. One thing I got to say is at least TShields responded to my questions fast so far when I asked if I'm on the current delivery list or the one later looks like July/Aug and they said current so crossing my fingers. Honestly I debated on getting OEM but hey you got to take a risk like stocks once in a while!!
Similar threads
- Marketplace listing
- Marketplace listing
- Locked
- Marketplace listing