What is the Daily Order Slot?

Sample Daily Order Slot Counter

The Daily Order Slot App keeps track of how many orders were placed for specific items, such as custom artwork and plexi, and counts down to zero. Once the counter is zero, those products are unavailable for sale for the remainder of the day.  Within a few minutes after midnight (commonly between 12:00am and 12:15am US EST), these products or services are available for purchase again.

Why Do You Need to Limit Custom Orders?

We developed this system to regulate how many custom orders come in after an extreme shortfall. Such shortfalls include:

• Consistent high demand due to a new game or event.
• Printer or other machine failure that prevents us from fulfilling custom orders for several days or weeks.
• Weather events that hinder staff from visiting the warehouse.
• Staff adjustments in case one or more members is sick or has a medical emergency.

Custom services require more time to prepare, process and ship than non-custom orders. The printer and laser machines have their own machine time to print and cut each artwork or plexi. Staff must also process these custom requests: transferring them to our internal templates, editing them for production when necessary, and communicating with customers who fail to submit their custom order properly. In short, there are only so many custom orders we can complete in a single day.

Before the limiter, custom orders per day could well exceed what our staff and machines can accomplish over multiple days.  For example, if staff could reasonably complete 25 artworks and plexi per day, without the order slot limiter, we would instead receive 50, 75 or 100 requests each day. This creates an extreme shortfall.

When a customer places an order, they anticipate that staff will begin processing their order the same day. Having no knowledge of backlog created by the shortfall, customers at the end of a long queue may grow impatient as the days pass.

The Daily Slot App mitigates some the backlog by setting expectations for you, the customer. Instead of 100 orders placed on a Monday, those orders are instead spread across multiple days. This allows our staff to focus on a smaller number of custom orders per day, while customers do not experience as much delay before their order begins to process.

I hope that the Daily Order Slot app addresses some of the concerns caused by backlog.  I recognize that any business should welcome as many orders as it can get. I am certainly thankful for them. This app was made to help our staff work through each day's custom orders within a reasonable timeframe.

If you have any questions about your order status, you can send a note to  orders@focusattack.com. 

Jaleel Beck
Final Boss