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.