Originally Posted by Sing
If the policy is not explicitly set out, I think you should eat the shipping charge for the backordered fabric.
And then you should set up a policy that if part of an order needs to wait, then the customer can choose to split up the shipping, i.e., pay for shipping twice, or cancel the backorder. Kind of like Amazon tells us we can ship separately or keep it together.
Or you can charge more for shipping from now on.
We do eat the shipping charge for domestic shipments. We can't eat the shipping charge for international because we would lose more money than we took in on the backorders; just can't do that. We certainly *can* specify a policy on our site for international orders; I'm just struggling with the wording given that English might not be the international customer's first language, and we don't want to confuse our US customers who also place backorders/preorders.
Our shopping cart is not as sophisticated as what Amazon has. They're big and we are little. We can't prevent international customers from putting backordered items in their cart, because we don't even know they are international customers until they start the checkout process.
Perhaps the safest policy would be "First we will try to contact you and ask if you would like us to charge you now for all in-stock items (plus shipping)... and then charge for each backordered item as it comes in ... and then hold the order for shipping complete whenever the last item comes in. And then if we do not receive a reply within a week we will ship what we have and cancel all backorders."
And this is essentially what we already do.
Overthinking again... what if the customer responds two weeks later, berating us for sending a partial shipment, because she was on vacation and unable to receive e-mails?
(Yes, this has happened. We just cannot seem to keep everyone happy even though we really do try!)