twesterm said:
The reason they can sell more later is because they can then go to the supplier and ask for more. If they can get more, then they allow more preorders. If they can't get more until the next scheduled shipment, then they're simply out until the next scheduled shipment. Really easy concepts here. So in Microsofts case, if Amazon commits to buying 300,000, Best Buy commits to 250,000, Gamestop commits to 400,000 and Wal-Mart commits to buying 350,000 (and lets just pretend that's every retailer) then they are only going to make 1.3 million or something really close to that. They aren't going to make many more because having that extra stock sitting around costs a lot of money. So preorders are not what companies use to guess how much to ship. All the retailers have already committed to a certain amount of the product, preorders are there to get you to commit to the retailer and to judge how much more they need to order. |
Keyword if, I doubt they have that much, and yes it is how they judge how much to ship, or rather how much they have shipped, course the closer they get to launch date the less time they have to up the amount, but again if a retailer has all the units sold to preorders that they already committed to, why wouldn't they just order more (unless they had reason to believe a large majority would cancel their preorders), so again the problem is on the supply end not the demand end unless the demand is outrageously high that the companies don't have enough room to stock more, which again isn't the case, bottom line, MS either started making them late and they will have a high failrate or is purposely holding back to make the demand appear higher then it is
