Category Archives: Site News

Holiday Schedule 2024

Here are a list of dates the warehouse will be closed. We will still be accepting orders during these times, but shipping of orders will be paused while the team is on break.

  • March 2-10
  • May 1-13
  • July 3-15
  • July 29 to August 13 (Black Hat, BsidesLV, DEF CON)
  • October 8-24
  • November 18-22 (Thanksgiving week)
  • December 20-27 (Christmas week)

Also note that it might take a few days to catch back up on shipments once back. We appreciate your understanding and support.

 

Holiday Schedule 2023

Here are a list of dates the warehouse will be closed. We will still be accepting orders during these times, but shipping of orders will be paused while the team is on break.

  • April 17-25
  • May 25-29 (Memorial day weekend)
  • August 4-16 (Black Hat, BsidesLV, DEF CON)
  • October 13-27
  • November 20-27 (Thanksgiving week)
  • December 20-27 (Christmas week)

Also note that it might take a few days to catch back up on shipments once back. We appreciate your understanding and support.

 

DEF CON 30 and Las Vegas

Hacker Warehouse will be in the vendor are during DEF CON 30. Maps were recently released and the vendors will be in the new Caesars Forum complex.

From a logistics aspect this means that online orders from 8/1 to 8/15 will start going out on 8/16. Shipments might be delayed further if inventory gets sold out at the event. If you are out there, please stop by our booth and say hello. We will have a few new products along with demo samples from our recent collaboration with Paragon Gear as well!

Thanks for your understanding about shipping impacts and we are excited to see our hacker friends and family again soon!

2022-08-20 Update: We are back and starting to fulfill orders in the backlog. It was amazing to see fellow hackers at the conferences. We did sell out on many items so we are waiting on a few manufacturing runs right now before we can complete some orders but majority of orders we should be caught up with in the upcoming week. I have seen lots of reports from people that they tested positive for covid that was caught during con. Wish everyone that caught it speedy recoveries.

2022-08-25 Update: I posted on twitter prior that we had flipper zeros coming in hopefully in time for DEFCON but sadly they got stuck in customs. If it weren’t for customs it would have made it to us in time. We did get the shipment cleared and forwarded on so stay tuned for our listing!

Supply Chain Impacts in 2021 Q3 and Beyond

This post is a continuation of information sharing on impacts that we are having as a retailer. Earlier posts in the series are Shipping Impacts during COVID-19 era from August 2020 and COVID-19, Shipping Impacts and Tariffs from April 2020. Please read them for additional context.

Chip and component shortages – One can’t start manufacturing runs until all of the components are available and the costs for components are going up. This becomes a two part issue. 1. Not being able to have stable inventory on some items and understanding when manufacturing can start for general timelines. 2. Increased costs.

Speaking to item 1, for those products being impacted, smaller batch runs are being made when possible and/or alternative designs using chips available are being made. Putting orders in the queue keeps your place in line and will be fulfilled in order. Sadly, I don’t have a way to provide a time estimate though.

As to item 2, similar to how we tried to shield customers with tariff costs we shielded off the first wave seen in price increases during this year, but components continue go up so in order to keep this business going, we will need to increase some product prices soon.

Electricity Shortages – This doesn’t impact us as much but factories in China are being forced to shut down for 1-2 days because of electricity shortages. So even if manufacturing can start, the factories aren’t able to operate at traditional capacity which then causes further time delays.

Inbound Shipping Carriers – Shipments into the USA has been troublesome. Container shipping costs have skyrocketed about 3-4x from a few years ago. Even after paying the added costs, the time to obtain goods is taking longer too as there is a backlog at the ports. Last month there were 60+ ships waiting at the LA port to offload goods, as of today writing there are over 160 ships waiting!

Typically we use air carriers instead of cargo ships as thankfully electronics are small. But occasionally we’ve had things in containers so this easily adds to the time delays.

Outbound Shipping Carriers – USPS, UPS, DHL all seem to be getting better and shipping times. Still not pre-covid delivery times but not the 2 week+ that we saw last year when it seemed like every carrier was in the overwhelmed state. As a negative side effect to getting shipments quicker, we’ve noticed that tracking information is not updated as often or at all. In the past I saw only a small amount of parcels show up to a customer before tracking information even shows up online. Now it seems like this happens for 1 out of 4 or 5 customers as our inquiries of package emails have increased. There isn’t anything for us to do here. If you got a shipping notification from us trust that we handed the shipment off to the carrier and it is in route. Please be patient and understanding that the tracking information isn’t as frequently updated vs pre-covid times.

I hope this information has been useful. We continue to stay open and here to support the community. Happy hacking. Cheers.

DEF CON 29 and Las Vegas

DEF CON 29 will be a hybrid event this year having both online and in person aspects to the event. Hacker Warehouse was lucky enough to get invited to be one of the vendors and we are excited to be out there and support the community!

From a logistics aspect, this means that online orders from 8/1 to 8/10 will start going out on 8/11. Shipments might be delayed further if inventory gets sold out at the event. If you are out there, please stop by our booth and say hello. We will have a few new products so make sure to check them out.

Lastly, we will be taking a trip next week to scout locations and ensure our setup will work where we are projecting to be. This means any order from 6/4 to 6/13 will start to go out on 6/14.

Thanks for your understanding about shipping impacts and I’m excited to see hacker friends and family again soon!

Shipping Impacts during COVID-19 era

Our last post in April referenced longer shipping times than normal. Now that we are several months into the COVID-19 era, I want to provide some insights on what we see as shipping timeframes, along with carrier links for their latest status updates.

In general, please be patient while deliveries are in transit. Once we package up and is in transit to you, it is in the carriers hands from there and we can’t do anything to make things go quicker.

Our insights from shipping out daily packages to our USA and international audience:

  • eCommerce is huge right now and tons of packages are overloading the shipping carriers. When speaking to our shipping support representatives, their explanation of the situation is “experiencing holiday volume without holiday staffing”.
  • We communicate with several other shops in various industries and across the board all the main carriers (USPS, UPS, DHL, Fedex) are seeing massive delays in international destinations.
  • We have seen various delays in our international shipments as well.
    • Ex: USA -> Canada: Seen instances of 2-4 week delivery times
    • Ex: USA -> Australia: Seen one instance of 6 week delivery time
  • Our domestic shipments seem to have decent delivery times still.
    • Some cases have seen upwards of weeks for delivery.

Various links:

Stay safe, be well, happy hacking.

COVID-19, Shipping Impacts and Tariffs

Shipping Impacts:

  • Southern California warehouse: As stated in our last post we are still open and shipping orders. Anything in stock, coming out of our location should shipped in our normal turn around time from an initial outbound perspective.
  • The nuance to the last statement is because while we are still shipping, we’ve seen carriers overwhelmed with the number of increased parcels in COVID-19 era and delivery times are slower. Please be patient while deliveries are in transit. We can’t really do anything to make things go quicker as it is in the carrier hands at that point. Interesting fact – major carriers have adjusted their language in their shipping service and they not longer guarantee deliveries in x days.
  • Apparel items do not come out of our Southern California warehouse and come from a few different locations that are in reduced staff mode. This translates to slower manufacturing times along with shipping times. This is temporary during COVID-19 era and please be supportive to adjusted timelines.
    • Edit 2020-06-01: Trend looks like six weeks backlog process.
    • Edit 2020-08-10: Current trend is getting better at 2-3 weeks backlog process.
  • Edit 2020-06-1 HackRF is back in stock. We do have a few products out of stock like the HackRF. That particular item is actually manufactured already, ready to go but has been sitting in the factory while China was closed for COVID-19. Now that parts of China is opening up again, every factory is trying to get parcels outbound which they tell me translates to a 2-3 week backlog impact.

Tariffs:

  • I’ve been trying to avoid this topic for a while, but it hasn’t gone away. We have been getting hit with ~15% additional tariffs on imports since 2019. We’ve been shielding our customers from this as we have been trying to fight it, along with knowing that price increases are never enjoyable. Just a potential warning but we are getting to the point where we might have to increase prices to account for the tariffs as our bottom line has been impacted not only from the tariffs along but also in COVID-19 era. If the tariffs get removed/reduced we will certainly revert back in those cases on the adjusted products.

Stay safe and well. Happy hacking.

Shipping Impacts – Q1 2020

2020-03-02 Update: Trips are being canceled and we are shipping as usual.

2020-01-30 Post:

We are on the road again! Since we will be traveling for a few events, wanted to let you know when we are closed.

  • Feb 10-14
  • Feb 24-28  – Canceled due to COVID-19
  • Mar 9-13  – Canceled due to COVID-19

All orders between those dates will be processed once we are back.

Happy hacking.

 

Shipping Impacts – Q4 2019

As the holiday season is coming, we wanted to let you know when we will be closed. We might also be closed for some travel to a security conference or two, but that is still TBD. For now, here is the list:

  • November 1-8
  • November 27-29 (Thanksgiving Break)
  • December 24-25 (Christmas Break)

All orders between those dates will be processed once we are back.

Happy hacking.

Update: We will be out from November 15-26 as well while at a SANS event.