[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,

Jon, 1st March 2011.
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