When you place an order directly from Busse Combat, as opposed to the BCS (which sells product that's on-hand) or a BladeForums 'ganza (where knives are sold as if the quantity is fixed, but delivery may take weeks, which has never made sense to me), it's a pre-order. Months may pass before they charge your card and send your order. I can only recall ordering from BC once, for a pair of Sus Scrofas; after a few weeks of seeing knife designs that I liked better but couldn't buy because I didn't know when that SS order would hit, I canceled. A long-delay sales model must be successful or Jerry wouldn't keep doing it, but I don't have the patience to wait for months. In my opinion, the time between a placing an order and receiving it should never exceed 6 weeks -- any longer gives the customer too much time to become frustrated and/or back out.