There’s almost nothing better than seeing that big box truck roll up to your doorstep with a scooter-size package, especially when it’s within 3 days of placing an order.
So why hasn’t your electric scooter arrived?
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dominating effect on industries around the world, and that impact trickles down to electric scooters.
According to Business Insider, "The pandemic broke the supply chain last year, and the shipping companies that move stuff all over the world still haven't recovered.”
Just watch this video from the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach from earlier this year. There were over 100 vessels waiting to dock and unload.
According to Melvin, Operations at VoroMotors (VORO), another issue complicating the shipping process has been a shortage of truckers to unload shipping containers once the ships are docked (extending the time they sit in the water).
Unfortunately, there’s lots of places along the long route from China to the United States where shipments are getting stalled.
Check out this timeline for how long it takes an electric scooter to go from the factory to VORO to your doorstep.
Looking at this 132-day process, scooters are spending up to 45% of transit time floating at sea and just a few days for QA inspection and repackaging at our headquarters.
With the popularization of electric scooters as a fun and affordable mode of transportation, we've worked hard to find ways to adapt to the surge.
We’ve increased our manpower at our new Los Angeles headquarters and New York store from 15 to over 50 team members, which were both established within the last few months.
We're focused on giving our customers the attention they deserve, like this technician walking through how to use the EMOVE Cruiser display with a customer at our Brooklyn store.
With more staff at both locations, we’ve amped up weekly training efforts to onboard new team members as quickly as possible, so we can keep up with customer demands.
And the demand for electric scooters, scooter parts, and scooter accessories has been huge.
We saw a significant surge through summer 2021, and are happily riding the wave.
However, we’re also willing to admit that we haven’t been able to maintain our intended schedule and response time given our relocation to a larger space earlier this year, and for that we apologize.
Along with expanding our warehouse space in California to accommodate more inventory, we opened our New York store so we could provide in-person customer service where we know our customers are located.
Although we have a large and growing workforce, the same team that packed up and moved our headquarters is responsible for quality checking and packing our products, and we’ve done our best to balance the workload.
Another factor affecting our ability is a shortage of parts, which is impacting the supply chain overall.
We’ve started receiving shipments to restock items at our LA headquarters, and are constantly preparing orders for customers all around the world.
We’re getting back up to high performance speed, more slowly than even we’d like, and we deeply appreciate the scooter community’s patience and understanding.
From shipping new orders to returning repaired electric scooters and sending out accessories and parts, our warehouse, customer service, and technicians teams are adapting and doing their best to accommodate all requests.
Although we don’t drive the trucks ourselves, we’ve designed special packaging, including this box for the EMOVE Roadrunner, to encourage package handlers to be more careful with VORO electric scooters.
We took a page out of Dutch-based bicycle manufacturer VanMoof’s book. By changing their packaging, VanMoof reduced shipping damage by 70-80%. Cross your fingers that we get the same results!
The Roadrunner box looks like it’s got a flat screen TV inside while the EMOVE Cruiser box appears to be carrying fragile wine glasses, and we’re hoping it helps get your scooter to you undamaged.
For more info on our shipping policies, please read here. If you’d like to know more about VoroMotors and who we are, check out our About page.
Become part of the growing scooter community by following us on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, and joining the VORO Owner’s Club.
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