Technical piece! Rawkhet Pokemon gets about 100 orders a day, and prepares Pokemon in batches. At the end of each preparation batch, about 50 emails get sent out for collection. This poses an interesting problem – how do we handle the trade queue in the most efficient manner? Is first-come-first-serve, or FIFO (first-in-first-out) the best solution?

We actually use a custom data structure called a Priority Queue. This gives each order a “weight” or priority which we base off how large the order is (in terms of number of Pokemon to trade). When customers respond to get added to the queue, something like this happens:

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With Pokemon Home’s release, looks like the 3DS consoles and LGPE are back in action. We’re back at Sword and Shield’s launch’s level of orders but we’re definitely more prepared this round!

Here’s how we’re handling more than 100 orders a day:

Once in a while, we get a customer that decides not to read any part of the website during their purchase. Just today, we had a customer that messaged us repeatedly (and rudely) after 5 hours of placing his order, despite the first line of the order confirmation page and the order receipt email, as well as the FAQ and Status pages, all indicating the estimate to be “within 24 hours”. In 3 years of Rawkhet, this is the first banned customer (albeit, we’re having quite a bad day to begin with).

The messaging across the website has had a lot of refinement and thought put into it. When customers ask questions that have already been answered, we try to link them to places they’ve missed (such as the FAQ or Trade Guide) – but questions on timing, particularly below 24 hours, are ignored.

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More announcements regarding Pokemon Home have sprung up! Looks like there’ll be some nifty trade features that we may be able to play around with. Rawkhet is definitely ready to tackle any challenges from Home, and the two expansions later this year.

There’s bound to be some interesting complications – will there finally be multi-trade? How easy will it be to move Pokemon around? Will this affect pricing? Such exciting times ahead, and thankfully at a time where orders have started to plateau out.

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