Fantastic First Fortnight (plus a few days)! Thank you!

Hello everybody!

Our first two weeks have come and gone, so let's take a look back real quick and go through some updates. With a rather understated opening of a single tweet and a single journal, you all really showed up for us! Thank you so much for your enthusiasm, support, and interactions on social media, plus our shop chat.

We here on the FA Merch Shop Team wanted to take a second and help clarify a few big things that we've noticed some confusion on.

  1. The Merch Shop Team does not share any members with the coding team or moderation team or forums team or anyone else. We're dedicated solely to ensuring that your order is fulfilled correctly and shipped on time! That means that we unfortunately can't do a thing about mainsite issues. Please continue using FA's support tickets for FurAffinity.net problems.
  2. As an addition to the above point, we DO control essentially everything in regards to the Shop. Several of you wonderful fuzzballs have been extremely helpful in ironing out some of the more buried settings in the Javascript and Liquid coding with our theme, namely some of the color pallettes for certain checkout buttons. If anything else seems off or hard to read, or you spy any spelelling mistkakes, please do let us know!
  3. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can reach us directly through the Shop chat widget on the bottom-right of your screen. We try our best to answer within 48 hrs at most, 24 hrs preferred, and usually within an hour, when we're not asleep. You can also email us: shop@furaffinity.net
  4. Alternatively, if you'd prefer to reach out through social media, such as Twitter's @FurAffinity account, those teams can get the message on over to us for you!
  5. While we were still waiting for official HMRC account approval when we launched, we're excited to announce that we now are able to ship to the UK. HUZZAH! (If you have no idea what I am talking about, here's a lovely little article about the changes to VAT taxes that went into effect January 1st of this year.)
  6. As is stated in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, we do not share personally identifiable information nor other sensitive information with anybody, including the main website team (except where there is a legal obligation to do so, such as with a subpoena or court order, of course). We don't actually share anything with the main site. All transactions and shop accounts are safely and securely handled through our web store host, Shopify.
  7. This is a merch shop for the FurAffinity.net website. This is not a Pride 2021 shop. That is not to say that we don't support Pride; 100% of the Merch Shop team are members of the LGBTQIA+ community! But we've noticed that some think that this shop is only going to be around for the month of June. Trust us, we've only just opened (coincidentally right near the beginning of Pride month) and still have a lot more in store! (Pun intended)
  8. We'd also like to emphasize that the FA shop is a companion to the main site. Our goals are to raise money to pay for mainsite hosting costs, and to bring in more funding to hire more coders! Having more coding staff means being able to tackle those big updates for which everyone's really been clamoring, and considerably faster, too!
  9. A lot of you are very excited and are demanding MOAR MERCH!! We hear you! Just to explain why we launched with limited options for preorder, we needed to START with preorders to gauge interest and actually pay for the production of the inventory. We are, unfortunately, not running a print on demand operation. This helps keep costs manageable for both the Shop and the customer, plus allows the greatest level of quality control! And speaking of PREORDERS...

...We're actually doing a little bit better than we had hoped on our in-stock estimates!

Our shirts have gone through their final proofs and are approved for printing and shipping to us! We hope to get them in by Friday, July 2nd. We'd then start shipping out the very next business day!

The stickers are actually ahead of schedule, and are arriving TODAY. Since our final shipping supplies also just got in yesterday, we're going to try to get all sticker only orders out tomorrow, IRL schedules pending.

The enamel pins are still right on track for our initial safe estimate, and are officially in production. We do not have any exciting news, or pictures to go along with them, just yet. BUT SOON...!

Finally, we've been hard at work for quite a while to bring you the best experience possible. From creating a SKU schema and database from scratch, to shopping around and vetting our manufacturing partners, to checking and double-checking and triple-checking our legal and tax settings and accounts, to creating barcodes and fulfillment systems to ensure order accuracy; we're SO READY to start getting this precious cargo into your hands! (Or paws. Or talons. Or tentacles, hooves, feet, prehensile tails, manipulative magic, or whathaveyou.) It's been great seeing such a positive response, and we love how excited you are for what comes next. If there's something that you'd like to see, such as pullovers/hoodies or mousepads or something else, let us know!

 

<3 Love, the FA Merch Shop Team

 

P.S. A huge thanks HAS to go out to FA's resident artists for working so hard on not only the product designs, but all the little bits of art/design throughout the Merch Shop. Y'all are AMAZEBALLS!

tl;dr Y'all are awesome; we're not the same team as the main FA site; and our preorders are ordered and on the way!

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