Baikal has many faults all around. Simply put, these are some of the many issues they have, and a few fixes they could implement to better serve their customers. If you don't want to read all of them, at least check out #4, as it's pretty messed up from my findings.
1. They request users to email them to make a purchase, which leads to too many confirmed orders compared to stock. Firstly they need to address the order process, and add an online 'store' to complete and confirm your order (reservation - pending payment), on a first come, first serve basis. Then provide the customer with a set amount of time (24 hours) to complete the payment and upload photos/screenshots of the completion to their order. If no photos/screenshots are uploaded with the specified time, the unit(s) is automatically put back into stock online immediately. If a staff checks the photos/screenshots and they are not valid, then the staff manually cancels the order, and the unit(s) is added back into stock online. This should help create a set of rules for everyone to follow, and will be fair to all customers.
2. Their announcing/releasing of products is horrendous at the moment. Announcing a product via Twitter, but having nothing on your website to back it up is just bad organization. First organize and announce everything on your website, quickly followed by Twitter, Facebook, and social media accounts as soon as you can afterward. This provides the users with all the information on the website, and at least links to more information on Twitter and Facebook. This should also result in less questions for their staff to deal with, since all necessary information should be available on the website.
3. Their announcement to Sale time and date should never be immediate. This should never ever happen. Period. What if Apple said during its iPhone announcement, "You can get them in stores right after I push this button". Everyone in the audience would be pretty upset they can't rush to an Apple Store to buy one for several hours, whom are potentially their most loyal shareholders and customers. Anyways, a specific date and time should be set, allowing at least 24 hours for customers to find the announcement, and prepare for the sale. This would at least provide customers all around the world with the same opportunity, and not just the specific time zone that's awake during the instant announcement and launch. Also, pending the transaction type, Saturday and Sunday may not be the best if requesting a bank transfer, as a lot of banks are closed on weekends. However if via coins, then any day should be fine.
4. Provide at least a similar amount of stock to customers directly, as to the supposed "contact resellers". If Baikal can't provide a similar amount of stock to its customers as they do to their mass resellers, then they need to fulfill these contracts prior to a product announcement. Therefore the customers won't even know thousands of units have gone to these resellers, while Baikal only has a couple hundred available.
Example - From the announcement on Sept. 12th, Baikal stated they only had 100 units available for preorder in October, and before they even uploaded anything on their website, all 100 units sold out. This was very clear from their website, and the several emails everyone received stating they are sold out. However, after the first sale was stated as Sold Out, Asic Miner Market online stated they had several units available (The most I saw was 20 units at the time, and for $2550/unit). This amount quickly Sold Out within a day. Then, when I check again 2 days ago, the supply had been replenished, and another 100 units were available from Asic Miner Market, under the October Presale availability as well ($2450/unit this time). I'm assuming the first batch was also possibly 100, but let's play dumb and say it was only 20 units. Adding the 100 units for their second batch, that's still 120 units from Asic Miner Market, and only 100 units sold from Baikal.
I thought it would end here; however, I watch the amount decrease to 78 units over a day, before rechecking today with a huge surprise of now seeing 149 units available for shipment in October as well. Adding all of these together, we get a minimum of 191 units for sale between $2450-$2550 (Over double the price compared to Baikal) from a reseller, and still only 100 units from the actual company Baikal! (Of course it was more the 191 units via AMM, but we're going with minimums I can confirm)
Overall, I understand this is just business, and these partnerships need to exist for certain companies, but that's also a ridiculous amount of products being sold and shipped just for resellers to mark up and make more of a profit than the actual company. Baikal needs to step it up with their direct sales to consumers, to increase their popularity and image. One can assume they do this because it's an easy and instant sale, with no hassle, bulk shipping likely within the same city, and minimal effort involved. Let alone no one else has any X11 miners available in stock anyways, so they are trying to get as many sales at double the price because there's nothing else to even buy. If Baikal would sell these units direct to customers, in a proper first come, first serve order, I guarantee they would surpass almost every other ASIC manufacturer on the market for popularity.
If someone from Baikal is even reading this, hit me up if you guys want a hand working on your customer service and image. I could help you guys change the market for ASIC producers.