My second controller finally arrived today, I should be happy about this and somehow I'm not.

Let me preface this by saying, if DSLR Pros customer service is to be believed then DJI takes a large portion of the responsibility for this as well and should be fessing up and apologizing to their customers.

I ordered my Inspire 1 with two controllers the second week of December through Amazon. The first week of January DSLRPros contacted me and told me that the Inspire's were getting ready to ship and if I could cancel my order through amazon and place directly through them they would send me a copy of their drone academy video (ended up just being a download code, a flight log notebook and a preflight checklist so it didn't cost them very much but was a nice gesture).

At the same time I ordered my Inspire 1 directly through DSLR Pros I also added a TB48 battery.

DSLR Pros charged my credit card on January 9th for the full amount of my two-controller Inspire 1 and the battery.

At the end of January my Inspire 1 arrived w/ a single controller and no explanation of where the second controller was or when I could expect it, I had to call DSLR Pros to learn that they were shipping separately and there was a delay in them receiving the secondary controllers from DJI (why is this a bundle then?)

A few more calls, every couple of weeks to ask for a status update later and my TB48 battery finally arrived the second week of March, still no explanation for the delay on the secondary controllers or an update on when they might be expected.


In early March I finally decided to ask for a refund but they would only offer to refund me the difference between the two-controller bundle and the single controller package ($100 less than it would cost me to go buy a secondary controller after the fact). I pushed for a refund of the full amount and they wouldn't authorize it. At this point they had been sitting on my full ~$3800's for two and a half months and not once reached out to me proactively to apologize for the delay or explain the situation.

Shortly after asking for a refund I spoke to a sales person who assured me that they had word from DJI that they would be receiving a shipment the following week and he would ensure they set one aside for me to ship out as soon as it arrived. The reasoning he gave for the delay was that DJI had some firmware issues with linking the second controllers and had delayed shipments to all of their distributors until they could work it out. He said they were frustrated that DJI didn't bother to make the information public so it was reflecting poorly on the distributors even though DJI was to blame. Of course I never received my controller in mid-late March as promised, nor did I receive any follow-up apology. I suggested several times when talking to them that it would go a long way towards winning their customers trust if they would send out an email blast explaining the situation and providing updates, they said they were planning on doing that... again, never happened.

A week ago was my last call to DSLR Pros and they told me that DJI had finally shipped them their controllers and that one was already on it's way to me. I hadn't received a tracking number so I asked for one at that point. They sent me a tracking number later that day and today I finally received my controller.

Now, I don't know how much this would normally bother me, I'm a pretty patient person, but the fact that I had to call them 4 or 5 times over the course of 3 months to ever get any kind of information on what was happening (and most of it was false at that) got to be extremely frustrating. That's my money you've been sitting on and this is my time you're wasting by not proactively updating your customers of the delays. I shouldn't have to sit on hold for 10-20 minutes each time I call to find out "oh sorry, we still don't have it and have nothing to tell you"

I feel pretty sore about investing thousands of dollars in the bank of DSLRPros for 3 months and never getting so much as an offered apology or acknowledgement things were f'd up.

If DJI is really to blame for some of their largest distributors not receiving shipments then that's pretty messed up too. At the very least an explanation would have been great.

hmmmmm. I was going to order one of their forward facing camera upgrades. I don't think I'll bother now.

I ordered a dual controller inspire from a Canadian retailer (Drone Depot) Jan 1st.  Apparently there is a huge backlog in dual controller packages from DJI, so I agreed to get the single controller version, which just arrived a few weeks ago (².5 months later). Not sure how much faster it would have been in I had just give for the single controller.  Anyway, I still hasn't received the second controller as of a week ago.  The story sounds generally consistent with your, and the DJI website had been consistently saying that separate controllers were unavailable the whole time.

Frustrating, but sounds like a genuine supply issue. I'm glad you've received your second controller, and I'm hopeful mine will have arrived when I return at the end of the week.

the problem as I see it though is that some distributors had extra controllers in stock for a full 2 months (copter shop had them as early as 2nd week of February) before they began fulfilling orders to people who had already paid for the 2 controller package. Whether that's an issue with DJI's fulfillment or DSLR Pros I don't know, but DSLR Pros could have done an infinitely better job of communicating the hold-up with their customers.