Can't completely blame anyone who chose to buy from TW over the past few years. Even two years ago - maybe even less than two - there were plenty of collectors stepping up to defend TW because they never had a problem with the company. The verdict on TW's reliability was still pending. However, that defence has to come with some caution because TW did have many red flags. I was tempted many times, but always decided to side with caution and not surrender any of my money to TW. I think many collectors chose to take a blind fervent risk to get their treasured figures from some affordable source and TW was a good gamble. This was a growing new business that did seem to take interest in being a contender in this market and they did deliver... delivered when they had stock, and often sporadically when they could only promise to have stock. That sporadic scenario seems to have turned into their dominant situation.
But here we are today, with everything we know about TW to date and staring down the demise of this ambitious joke of a company. It's kind of clear that they bit off more than they could chew, tried to be the big new fish in a small pond, and ultimately just ate their own honey in that stream. In my area of Ontario Canada we had at least 3 local online collectible shops fall apart in the exact same way over the past couple of years, with tens of thousands of dollars swiped from collectors pockets. Didn't matter how many complaints were waged against the companies, didn't matter how many bad reviews were out there, didn't matter what their retail score was like, didn't matter how many collector-to-collector peer warnings and cautions were posted online, someone if not many still chose to throw their money at these risky shops and someone else still chose to defend their track record.
There really did seem to be a trend of massively failing businesses between 2021-2023. We can discuss all the socio-economic reasons, but it seems more a pattern of shops trying to mount a viable business using a strictly online model, during COVID no less, but without enough infrastructure backing to remain stable through one of the worst retail economic scenarios of recent history. In all cases these shops were generally fine with delivering in-stock merchandise, but horribly incapable of fulfilling preorders. A typical sad scenario of over-promising while under-delivering. Also, in all cases they were taking full payment upfront for preorders, which is always a bad idea. By the time these shops collapsed it was clear they were taking all those thousands of dollars of preorder money to fuel their business' operational expenses (and salaries) rather than use it to stock merchandise. (Note: High-end collectible profit margins are extremely low for retailers so the bulk of the MSRP we pay is going to straight to the acquisition of product, not the business' profit line. The shops make their money on volume and being able to move the merchandise.) There's no defence of TW here, but merely a glimpse of what seemed like a viable option for collectors at one time. Clearly, that time has passed.