Yesterday we highlighted the shipping problems with the Oculus Rift pre-orders and the lack of communication from Oculus. Today there’s finally been a response from the Oculus camp.
A mail has been sent out to those who pre-ordered aplogising for the delay which reads.
“We know you’re anxious to receive your Oculus Rift and apologize for not updating your order status sooner. We’ve been working through an unexpected component shortage, and unfortunately, that issue has impacted the original shipping times for some early customers.
“We’ve working hard yto get up-to-date ship windows, and you should expect to see your order status updated on Oculus.com by Tuesday, April 12. Although many rifts will be arriving on schedule an din line with original estimates,we’ll be covering shipping and handling costs for all orders placed through today.
“We’re shipping rift everyday . Don’t hesitate to reach out to the Oculus support team if you have additional questions.”
Oculus’ Brendan Iribe also took to Twitter to tell inform customers of the action they are taking:
“First set of Rifts are going out slower than we orig estimated, so we’re giving free shipping for all pre-orders, including international”
According to Oculus a large number of emails are being sent out and customers should not be worried if they have not received one yet.
“We’re sending a very large number of emails which are done in waves over a very long period of time. This said, emails are an imperfect beast. There’s spam filters, ISP mail configs, domain bounces, or maybe you are just a popular person that gets a crap-ton of email and it’s buried. If you don’t get it, IT DOESN’T MATTER. If you have an order from the launch of preorders on January 6th through the end of day on April 1st (Pacific Time), we’re footing the bill for shipping, globally. That’s it. You’re welcome.”
Oculus took some time to get this information out and it’s taken articles and community posts to bring them out of the woodwork. The “component shortage” was probably an issue they were not keen on highlighting and hoped it would be resolved quickly. The free shipping is a nice bonus as it removes a decent chunk of the cost for customers.
