I mean just look at Avalon, pre pay in full with no refund... that's on batch #2 Avalon is losing absolutely nothing no matter what happens, anyone ordering is taking all the risk (big or small its still risk). When purchasing goods it is not normal for the consumer to take ALL the risk while the retailer and manufacture take none. God I wish I could get away with this type of business model at my job!
Do you build to order in your job? It's actually pretty common to pay upfront and not be able to get a refund on built to order goods. Bitcoins ASICs have had a long timeline from order to delivery on their first batches and you're right that customers were bearing a large risk. I don't think you can say that they were bearing
all the risk, though, because it's highly likely that first batch sales didn't cover development costs.
No-one's forcing anyone to pre-order. Plenty of people have decided to wait until BFL is shipping on a normal retail basis rather than pre-order from anyone.
You're apparently also overlooking the fact that Avalon didn't intend to ship rigs initially so they weren't set up for that. They've been open about the fact that pre-order funds for Batch 2 will be used to build the units.
Actually I do BTO work at my job. I work for a rack and cabinet manufacture as an account manager and about 20% of my business is custom sheet metal fab. Any custom or BTO job we take our quotes are very clear that they are non-cancellable and non-returnable once material has arrived and fab has started. We also provide the client with a production drawing for sign off approval. I know its just metal and not electronics IP etc and we are not selling retail (we are distribution centric). We never take money up front, in fact we get a PO and the client is billed and is required to pay net 30 after delivery. I certainly would never suggest ASIC manufacture is anything like what we do and certainly what we do is not realistic for this situation I get that. My point is all about only taking full payment pre-orders to transfer much of the risk to the consumer/end user.
Forced wasn't the best word, I didn't intend for it to be translated literally. What I should have said was if you want to get into ASICS you will only be able to do by full payment pre-orders thus transferring a debateable amount of risk from the manufacture to the consumer.
As for "All" the risk OK maybe that was to unilateral but they shed some risk from themselves to the consumer by only accepting orders the way they do.