Hello,
Tobias here from Ascrono. I'm very sorry about the delayed response from our customer support. You did catch us in a week where more staff than usual was on vacation.
I can see based on our customer support system that we did respond within 2 days. You reached out on the 19th and we responded on the 21st. I can also see that we refunded you on the same day. I am very sorry about the delay, we do our best to get back to everyone within 24h or faster!
To address your concern in regards to your Pre-Order and having to pay upfront for it:
New MacBook models are released frequently. We try to support the newest MacBook models with our dock as quickly as possible. Once we have a release date, we offer customers to already secure a unit from the first batch by placing a Pre-Order.
When placing a Pre-Order you ensure that you get a unit from the first batch and you will be one of the first customers we ship to (in chronological order). In addition, we provide a discount for ordering early (which future customers cannot get).
We do bill for Pre-Orders immediately and I believe many other companies do the same for example Apple. (They may not call it Pre-Order but 2-3 months until shipping for a new MacBook or iPhone is exactly that)
We will make some adjustments to our website to make this more clear.
In case you are not ready to Pre-Order and want to wait for the final release we do have an email list that you can join for any of our Pre-Orders to get notified when the product is available for immediate shipping. This does not guarantee that you'll be one of the first to get one, we sometimes sell out via the Pre-Orders even before the release date. The next batch can then sometimes take a bit of time. There will also not be any discounts once new products are released.
If you have any other questions feel free to contact us directly. Again, we will do our very best to respond within 24h to all messages!