Hi everyone,
First off, I wanted to thank all of you for your patience in the last couple months with all of the issues that the metals market as a whole are experiencing. After the recent massive drop in spot prices, everyone has been struggling to keep up with the increased demand whether it be miners, government manufacturers, or retailers like us. I know the longer-than-usual delays are exasperating at best, infuriating at worst. There's a ton of work that goes into managing inventory levels on our side of the equation, and when governments fail to produce goods in any kind of timely manner despite us sitting in the order queue for months after prepayment, it makes everyone's job a lot harder here. You all have been quite understanding and patient with the issues at hand, and I really appreciate it since as the saying goes, "poop rolls uphill".
To that end, you'll likely notice that a number of silver items have now been disabled. Liberty Eagles, most of the Sunshine products, and a few other products are now unavailable for purchase due to major issues in the supply chain. We've been working off of our own internal inventory without having the ability to restock a few months now, with thousands of ounces of silver sent out while continually harassing the manufacturers we deal with to try and replenish our reserves. Now that we're running so low on those particular items, with no ability to restock, I've had no choice but to disable them for now.
In terms of our other inventory, we've been pouring every penny into reserves in an effort to keep up mitigate the issues market-wide. For a lot of items where other retailers in the USD market or otherwise are struggling to get any stock at all, we're pretty well set. Products like Silver Eagles and Silver Maples are in very short supply for most folks, but we've been maintaining enough float that there's much less issue for our clients than from other retailers in the precious metals market. One thing to note is the greatly increased premiums on those types of items seen industry-wide, and we haven't followed suit - we're taking the hit and subsidizing the extra cost out of pocket to make sure that your experience is not only smooth, but the best possible investment of your hard-earned Bitcoins.
In the mean time, I've been restructuring things as far as the off-brand and large-bar inventory we keep in stock. You'll start seeing new silver items showing up on the site in the next few weeks, along with some new gold items. The first item I'm happy to announce is the Valcambi CombiBar(
http://coinabul.com/index.php/valcambi-combibar-50gram-gold-bullion.html ) - this unique 50 gram gold bar is divisible into single-gram increments simply by snapping the perforations formed on the bar during the manufacturing process. It's one of the more unique items to hit the gold markets in recent years, and luckily we have access to a direct supply. Since it's a new item with fairly high manufacturer's premiums attached, and a larger-than-usual denomination we'll not be keeping a ton in stock initially but if they prove popular they'll be available, as with the rest of our inventory, in bulk.
I'll keep everyone appraised as new inventory starts to hit the site, but for now things should be moving more quickly in general as a result of some of the reshuffling we've done in the last month. On top of the changes we've been making to the inventory, I've also hired some new shipping staff members, expanded our offices, upgraded our fiber link, and added new servers to our cluster. With all the tweaks, both the site and order processing should be able to keep up with our continual growth. Provided that the Bitcoin market continues to remain stable in terms of exchanges, regulations, banks, etc everything should continue to run smoothly.
Thanks again for your patience in these chaotic markets,
Jay
