Reply To: Spider v4 – Final Ever Production

[ForumAdmin]

I was ordering PCBs from the company making them (letting me end up with the double-sided, plated through holes and coated 0.7mm thick PCBS of the v4.0) in batches that roughly worked out 200-300 boards a go. I’d estimate a few thousand Spiders went to retail customers out over the entire life-span. I was building them in 10 unit batches, and some days would do 2-3 hours on assembly. ausmicro.com itself consumed 4-5 hours a day between the shop sales, the Spider production and

It’s actually what killed ausmicro.com for me 🙁 One of the XMods specialist stores in the US started buying from me (no problems a few people in the US and Europe were buying batches for resale/OEM additions). After a few successful batches of 5-10 units a “big” order was made at an agreed price. I built it and shipped it. It didn’t arrive. So I shipped out a single smaller batch, which did. Figured that the first big batch was a loss and re-built/sent the full order again (but as the customer was sounding a bit sketchy, I put full tracking on it). This had delayed everything by a few weeks and the customer quickly ordered another similar batch.

Two weeks later whammy – the ausmicro.com Paypal account gets locked down and all his previous big orders in the appropriate time-window are flagged with the “not received” B/S. There’s back and forth with PayPal about it. He has our e-mails about stuff not coming through and me agreeing to resend, I have tracking info, but back then it wasn’t online tracking so PayPal didn’t accept it as being “real”. Was fairly normal PayPal tactic of nailing the seller account to the wall.

I was out of pocket for at least 3 batches, had used the majority of my stock of parts building them (and wasn’t making big $$ on the bulk orders) and couldn’t effectively sell/buy or extract the cash that I kept in PayPal day to day.

Once we got everything back working again the GFC had started hitting US sales and I could never get ahead of the curve again. And motivation just wasn’t there.

Yeah fun times 😉