Yesterday we put the Falcon units we had received from VEX up for sale on our storefront. While we were expecting to sell out quickly, it would be an understatement to say the response was shocking - we sold out of Falcons in about 2 minutes! This unfortunately meant many of our customers had a frustrating experience and most were unable to obtain Falcons.

To be clear: We at CTR Electronics are not happy with the experience many of you had to go through while trying to purchase from us. Our goal is to make purchasing - even of high-demand items - straightforward and as hassle-free as possible. In this instance we fell short of that, and we're committed to making the experience better moving forward.

The rapid purchase of units caused several issues:

- Stock selling out while folks were in the checkout process because inventory isn't allocated until purchase is complete.

- Back-in-stock emails arriving after Falcons were sold out as the notification service took several minutes to process the sheer volume of stock notifications.

- Processing limited numbers of Purchase Orders because of the speed of web sales.

We consider all of these unacceptable. While solutions will not occur overnight we will be looking for ways to mitigate or solve all of the above issues for the future.

But really at the core, all of these issues are symptoms of the larger issue: lack of supply to meet teams' motor needs. We have been and continue to work diligently to have adequate supply for all of our products. Knowing the high demand for Falcons we attempted to secure as many units as possible, including working with VEX to attempt to allocate more units from this year's manufacturing batches. Behind the scenes we are also making efforts to improve sourcing so that Talon FXs can be in stock and regularly obtainable like the rest of our products. Our goal is for every team that wants to use the brushless technology of our Talon FX be able to do so.

We appreciate everyone's continued support as we strive for improvement and excellence in providing world-class robotics solutions.

Now speaking more personally from all of us at CTRE:

We never want to go out of stock on a product like this, especially during the critical FRC buying period starting in the late fall through the end of the competition season. For this season we literally bought as many of these as we could, and pushed to get them here as early as possible to meet the needs of your teams. While the on-going issues with global supply-chain are a reality, it doesn't change that we've been unable to provide the level of service we know we can deliver. We’re not at all happy with how things went this year, and we’re already working to make dramatic changes for 2024 to ensure this doesn’t happen again.