Sofirn shipping delay and privacy breach

My order of Dec 30 has not yet shipped.

They recently sent out nearly 500 emails which allowed every recipient to see all the recipients’ email addresses.

Back to back fails are not a good thing.

That’s strange. My Dec 31 order was shipped Jan 4th. Contact Lan Lee; sofirnlight[at]gmail.com. He can help you.

You probably won’t see it for weeks now, after Chinese New Year celebrations are over. The end/beginning of the year is a bad time to order anything from China.

CNY starts Febr.1th. Plus China hosts the Winter Olympic’s from Febr.4 till Febr.20. Because of COVID, things are more restricted than ever. Even birds, bats and dragons aren’t allowed to fly over Beijing.

Not even Mothra?

Mothra’s job is to protect the good people. Those are called: Japanese.

If Godzilla can get to NY, Mothra can fly to China.

I have no idea really how it works but my understanding is that many factories shut down in mid January as employees travel home before the celebrations. Sofirn has this at the top of their website:
“Thank you for purchasing from our website. I sincerely aplogogize that your order can’t be shipped out in time. Because the Chinese New Year is approaching and orders have suddenly increased, our colleagues who work in the factory have gone home on holidays, so the delivery may be delayed. Sorry for the delay!”

The OP sounds like they’re part of the group that ordered an SC31 Pro kit with Anduril v1 that Sofirn put on clearance sale at the end of the year. A very good deal, with free shipping*.

Word of that offer was posted to Slickdeals, where the hungry pack inundated Sofirn with orders that it couldn’t fulfill, presumably given what limited stock of the v1 remained.

That wasn’t helped by the fact that the store wasn’t configured to charge shipping for orders that didn’t meet the amount to qualify for free shipping, and accepted orders not commensurate with remaining stock constraints.

Those errors were compounded by an odd, and unnecessarily candid message sent by Sofirn, asking those buyers to add a tailcap, and a shipping charge, to their orders, as well as accept a substitute for in-stock Anduril v2 version of the light, with the 6500K option, reading in a “dog ate my homework” fashion, and not offering an explicit option to cancel. Those messages were conveyed via a personal account, and via a Replay All mistake (not a data breach), which didn’t contribute to an air of professionalism.

As to be expected, that was confusing, not well received, and served to give the impression that Sofirn is a scammer, and validate whatever skeptical notions may have already existed about the trustworthiness of businesses from that part of the world. Those who are customers and familiar with the brand know that Sofirn, while not perfect, isn’t a scammer and that’s not their MO. It also left an unpleasant taste for those who were previous owners, with good reason.

After some more grumbling, and pleading, Sofirn then offered the option to wait for the 5000K A2 version to be produced, or for cancellation and refund. It also summarily cancelled some orders, which is probably what it should have done with most of the lot to begin with, and however blunt, how most companies would have handled the situation.

Add the CNY holiday timing into the mix, and the result was a big ole’ stinker that probably didn’t leave anyone happy, tarnished what little reputation Sofirn had among non-enthusiast Slickdeal readers, but, should hopefully serve as a learning experience.

So, it’s not really about the holiday timing, except coincidentally, and the OP should contact Sofirn directly.

I remember that. It took a month to get my money back from paypal, but I got it back. It does sound like OP might be one of those customers.

Edit: I’ll add that sofirn contacted me pretty much immediately and made things as right as they reasonably could. The delay was due to paypal, not sofirn. I think sofirn actually ended up losing a couple bucks in fees over it. So it was nice that they didn’t try to push those fees on to me, and I remain their customer.

Flashlights always go on sale at times when orders are the least able to be fulfilled. Happens every Chinese New Year.

Yeah technically from Feb 1st. In practice for office workers the holiday starts on Jan 29 or sth. For electronics factories? It’s already started, due to the tripled coal prices (No.1 source of electricity in China) and tightened quotas for emission and industrial electricity usage. Also, even in previous years, logistics, be it domestic or international, has always been a total mess around CNY.

During Winter Olympics birds will be fine and allowed to go anywhere. Bats will be intoxicated by the winter smog in Beijing anyway. Dragon? Nah. It’s for Oct 1st (their July 4th). lol.