This is interesting (and good!) – Starting December 8th online retailers need to make sure they ship your stuff within 30 days via The Verge & The Hill.
The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days. That is why direct marketers sometimes call this the “30-day Rule.”
If, after taking the customer’s order, you learn that you cannot ship within the time you stated or within 30 days, you must seek the customer’s consent to the delayed shipment. If you cannot obtain the customer’s consent to the delay — either because it is not a situation in which you are permitted to treat the customer’s silence as consent and the customer has not expressly consented to the delay, or because the customer has expressly refused to consent — you must, without being asked, promptly refund all the money the customer paid you for the unshipped merchandise.
Adafruit has never taken backorders or pre-orders, this is because if you order something it means we have it in stock and it ships immediately – We even ship it same day if you choose UPS and if it’s before 11am (not holidays or weekends of course). Right now, our on-time shipping is 99.9% for all orders! Each month we ship over 20,000+ orders from our NYC factory.