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Hi everyone,

Update time – with less than 24 hours to go before we close off on batch 19 we are working around the clock to make sure that any last minute orders get added properly, making some last minute changes and tweaks to recent orders and answering a small mountain of incoming emails.

So if you wanted to make any changes or get a last minute order in – NOW is the last chance to do so! (once we close off, we are locked in to production mode and no further additional orders are possible).

While we have a few loose ends to tie up properly before we can officially send the entire batch to the forge and they can start production, the delay should be only a couple of days at worst as we double check to make sure everything is as it should be and deal with any last minute craziness.

I’ll post again once we are closed off and then when we begin batching, so when the forge is in full swing again we can coordinate the shipment of batch 18, which should hopefully have cleared customs by then and be under inspection by my agent for final shipping.

Gotta go, there’s a lot to be done!

– Paul

Hi everyone,

Well, I have confirmed that April the 6th will be ‘D-day’ for last orders on batch 19. And a new timer is up and running to commemmorate it!

If we ‘overheat’ with a sudden stampede of orders I will hit a kill switch too cool it down for a day or two while I continue to talk to everyone via email as I don’t want someone to miss out because they have a lot of questions. So if that happens I’ll post here and explain what will happen (as I refuse to take on more orders than the forge can handle).

Batch 18 hasn’t quite come in to customs yet and may be a few more days before it hits customs, so I’ll post again on this shortly too. Customs usually takes 7 days with our swords and we do have to jump through a few hoops, but we do our best to comply with whatever they need and do not envision any serious delays (it’s just a pain – but my agent is gearing up to process them as quickly as possible without missing anything important during the QC checks).

Incredibly busy right now, but as we want to try and get all orders in to the forge as quickly as possible after the 6th please note that the window to make adjustments to existing orders is closing, so if you want to make a change you will need to let me know ASAP. And as paypal echeques take 3-5 working days to clear, at this point I’m afraid that from the time of this post onwards, echeque orders will be refunded once they clear as we cannot afford to hold up the current batch.

Ok, got to go – I’ll be in touch again soon!

– Paul

Well, it’s only been a couple of days or so into accepting new commissions for batch 19 and already we are at something like a third of the forges maximum comfortable production capacity (for obvious reasons, we don’t give them more orders than they can correctlty make within the 90 day target timeframe), so if orders progress as they have in previous batches we will start to batch up all the orders on 5th or 6th of April (current guesstimate only).

To make sure that as many people as possible get their orders in before we close off I will soon be putting another ‘countdown’ timer thingy at the top of this page, but this time counting down until orders close..

To help with the heavy workload at the moment my new assistant Karyn Thomas has been helping process the orders as we go and is doing a great job. While Karyn has been trained in every aspect of how to process an order when it comes in and record it’s unique custom combinations in the format we have developed with the forge, she isn’t entirely familiar with every aspect of the product line, so in the meantime I am getting through as many emails as possible, double checking the orders and coordinating batch 18 to come in (which should be just about to reach customs now, I’ll check on it again after this post!).

Anyway, I’ll post again once the countdown timer is on and when we have some more news on the incoming batch 18 – but in the meantime please bear with me if my email response times are a little slow, I do each one personally and am not the best typer in the world (I’m probably hitting backspace at least 50% of the time! Lol).

– Paul

Just a quick note about the newly added shipping module – while I tested it extensively before roll out, a customer recently emailed me to advise that he was having trouble – and it would appear that there is one ordering scenario that it has trouble getting its ‘head’ around.

If you order more than one sword with a different shipping price (for example, a SBG Katana with free shipping and a Cheness iaito with $30 shipping) the system gets confused and doesn’t know which shipping rate to use – and despite spending the better part of a day trying to teach it this simple concept, it still doesn’t ‘get’ it.. (gotta love computers!).

Anyway, sorry about this – but for the time being if you wish to place an order for more than one product with different shipping rates (i.e. the example above of a free shipping offer and a $30 shipping option) please place two seperate orders.. 🙁

Hopefully I should be able to find a better solution to this shortly – as SBG ships from several different warehouses it’s hard to make the software understand when it thinks everything is coming from the one central spot.

We will figure it out (note – the store and site is still working fine, apart from this one scenario. If someone does find something else not adding up right with the shipping though please let me know and we will get it working like it should).

Thanks all,
– Paul

Over the coming weeks and months I will be spending a lot of time updating the store and working on ways to make my customers experiences better.

Two of these changes have been added in the last couple of days – the first one is a much better and more robust shipping module. In the past we had some orders come in for products that cannot be shipped to some countries, or that did not automatically calculate the shipping cost which created a fair amount of extra work and delayed the order. This has since been fixed, and it would seem the new module is doing a great job.

The second update is an ‘out of stock’ notifier so if you click the order button on a sword that is out of stock you get the option to enter your email address and be notified when it comes back in.

Many more changes and updates are on the books – our goal is and has never been to be the biggest store. The store is, after all, just a way to fund the site and SBG community. So competing with normal sword stores is not something that we want to or will do – the more varied the vendors the better for everyone!

Our goal has always been to highlight a few really good swords that are not widely distributed elsewhere – and do it in a way that makes it as easy and informative for the sword buyer as possible.

More coming on this shortly, we have some very exciting months ahead. 🙂

Talk again soon,
– Paul