[GZG] From GZG, latest situation update (March 1st)....

Right, it's Tuesday morning, 1st March!

As explained in earlier posts, we are now CLOSED to all orders
(online, email, phone AND post) until we are ready to re-open with
the all-new online store. I HOPE that the re-opening will not be
later than the start of April, but that's just going to depend on how fast I
can get things done and what problems we hit! All the pages of the current
store are still up, so you can still browse our products and have a think
about what you'd like to get
when we re-open, but you can't select items or put them in the cart.
Please DON'T email or phone me to ask if you can place an order anyway,
because we are CLOSED to all new orders!! The old store pages will continue to
show the old prices of all items until they are
taken down and replaced with the new store listings - there will be
some price increases when the new store goes live, as explained in
earlier posts - ever-rising costs have made this unavoidable - but
please see the shows info below for some special news.

Special note: over the next couple of days, my web admin (and thus
the gzg site) will be moving over to a new hosting company - this
shouldn't affect anything except that there may be a little down-time
involved in the changeover - all the relevant URLs and  other details
will be unchanged, so you shouldn't have to alter your bookmarks.

MAIL-ORDER PROGRESS:
I'm still extremely behind with order dispatches due to the sheer volume of
them, and of course there was the expected mad rush in the last few days as
lots of you scrambled to get your orders in before the hiatus; the current
situation is that all orders placed in JANUARY have now shipped out (with the
exception of a couple of customers who are not responding to emails!), and
I've made a good start on February's backlog. The severe delays at US Customs
seem to
be continuing (see earlier post below) so please allow for this - but
if you are still awaiting an order placed in January then it IS in transit and
should be with you soon. For those of you who placed orders in February, they
will be going out as fast as we can possibly
do them - at least now that no new ones will be coming in, the pile
will at last start to go down!

Aside from clearing the backlog of orders, the other things we need to get
done while we're closed are making the moulds for the
long-awaited new releases, making as much stock as we can so that we
are able to return to a quick order turnround once we re-open,
getting things ready for the major shows we have coming up (more on this
below), and of course getting all the necessary work done for the new online
store.

Once the new store is up and running I will send out new voucher codes to
those of you who emailed me to request deferment of your February vouchers
till June. A lot of you took up this offer, though quite a few of you used
your vouchers in February as originally intended. Please note that though the
store is now closed, there is
no deadline on requesting the voucher deferment - so if you've not
used yours, you CAN still email me and convert it into a June voucher.

One of the big time-saving improvements (for me) of the new store
will be the online processing of payments - with the old system, I
seemed to spend a significant chunk of time trying to sort out cards
that wouldn't authorise, wrongly-typed card numbers etc - under the
new system, the payments will be authorised at the point of order -
so this will take away not only the time I waste chasing up problems, but also
all the time I have had to spend just processing each card payment, sending
Paypal invoices and all the rest. All this SHOULD add up to more time actually
spent doing what I should be doing, which is making stuff and packing orders,
rather than sorting out problems!

SHOW NEWS:
Soon after we re-open, we have SALUTE - at Excel in London as usual,
this year it's on the 16th April. Then we have TRIPLES in Sheffield,
which this year is quite a bit later than usual, on the 21st/22nd
May. In June, we'll be at GAMES EXPO in Birmingham from the 3rd to
the 5th - we had to miss this one last year due to our workshop move,
this year we'll be back! Now, definitely for SALUTE (and POSSIBLY for Triples
and Expo as well, though I will confirm this later) we will having an
across-the-board special - ALL our products AT THE SHOW will be at
our PRE-INCREASE PRICES - in other words, you can buy stuff on the
day of the show at the prices from our old store. This is partly because we're
so good to you, but more because I just won't have time
to re-label and re-price all the displays before the show!  ;-)

I'm sure that's enough info for you all to digest at the moment, please keep
checking back here and I'll keep posting updates at
regular-ish intervals to keep you all informed.

Best regards,