Walmart doing Walmart things...cancelling pre-orders

For us international collectors we have to rely on online pre orders from Wal-Mart and Target because we either won't see these here or don't have the stores

Same case for me too, and I live in a major Canadian city.

My local Walmart never receives anything because it's too centralized, but the Walmart's closer to the US border, and the ones outside of the city always receive new stuff. I constantly see posts from members of a Facebook group showing off their purchases from Walmart, then I'll visit mine and they either have nothing or they're stuck with a small handful of figures from months back.

I just canceled the stage because of this. am I gonna do with a stage with no figures?

What’s your suggestion for international collectors when it comes to US store exclusives like this though?

Just received my Nash cancelled pre order. Walmart is terrible.

I wish I knew the contract details between Mattel and Walmart before investing in a line lol .

I feel like Walmart has a ton of outs if a certain line doesn’t sell “x” amount of units after the first few waves . Like they can scale back their purchases on future waves which is why they would cancel preorders . Because they wouldn’t have enough to fulfill all online orders plus store orders . Could be dead wrong , but what others reason can they have for canceling orders ?

I work for a distributor that does preorders for items that sometimes take a year to get to us from the manufacturer. And the only reason we’d ever cancel a preorder is if the manufacturer just doesn’t send the items

Mattel says they are sending the items so ? ? ? ?

can we just stop pre-ordering mass retail released figures?
its not necessary

They're supposed to be mass released, but they aren't. Not even close. I live in an area where there are about 7 Walmarts within an hour from me, and only 2 of them ever received any of the RA series and they hit once and were never seen again. The better question is, "Can they just stop offering pre-orders and holding your money for items they have no intention of delivering?"

I think it's pretty obvious Mattel doesn't care if we actually can find Walmart exclusives in Walmart stores or get them in the mail. Mattel already got paid for them, that's all that matters to them as a business. I mean, people have been rightfully complaining how lousy Walmart is at stocking these things at retail, and what an absolute joke their pre-ordering system is, but Walmart threw Mattel the cash,so it doesn't really matter to them. They gotta make money to stay in business. That's a hard truth, but it is what it is.
On a more positive note, I've only had one figure I pre-ordered out of every Legends line put out by Target as exclusives to be canceled so far. That was Beefcake, and we still don't know what happened with that series. That was just weird. So yeah: Walmart bad, Target good.