Oculus Rift Offers Free Shipping for Delayed Orders
Roughly a week after Oculus Rift founder and inventor Palmer Luckey personally delivered the very first unit to the very first pre-orderer and the company has told customers they might have to extend their patience. To compensate for the delay, Oculus will take care of the shipping charges.
"First set of Rifts are going out slower than we [originally] estimated, so we're giving free shipping for all pre-orders, including international [orders]," Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said on Twitter on Saturday.
Iribe added in another tweet that free shipping will be available for those who placed their orders from January, when pre-orders opened, until the end of the day on April 1. The Oculus Rift was initially expected to ship starting late March.
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"If you ordered between Jan and end of day April 1 Pacific Time time, your shipping is free!" Iribe said on Twitter.
The company followed up the announcement with an email to customers which stated they would receive a new shipping date on April 12. The email also revealed that the delay was caused by an "unexpected component shortage," although it didn't specify what the affected parts are. The Oculus also did not mention details about the number of affected shipments.
Oculus, which was bought by Facebook in 2014, is expected to sell about 500,000 units of the VR device this year, according to analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray & Co. This is only one percent of Facebook's revenue, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
Its competitors, the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR, are also facing their own setbacks. Some pre-orders for the former were canceled due to "processing issues with financial institutions," though HTC is working to address the problem. Meanwhile, Sony's VR device was expected to release in the first half of 2016, but is now slated to release in October.
