Although cities have reopened and America has begun to return to work, there are no indications yet that the world has begun to see the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has created supply shortages in seemingly every industry, and the vaping industry has been one of the hardest hit.
For the vaping industry, the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t have come at a worse time. As you’re about to learn, recent legal happenings within the vaping industry would have been likely to create an e-liquid shortage anyway. The supply chain issues caused by the pandemic have only made the situation worse.
If you’re experiencing the effects of the vape juice shortage when you try to find your favorite flavors, you aren’t alone – and this article will explain why. If you’re not interested in the reasons for the shortage and just want to know how to find your favorite e-liquid, though, here’s the trick.
If you want to have the best possible chance of finding your favorite flavor every time you shop for vape juice, your best bet is to buy from the biggest vape shops like E-Cigarette Empire. The biggest retailers place the largest orders with their suppliers, and that means that their orders get preferential fulfillment. The more prominent the retailer is, the more likely it’ll be that you won’t have to deal with the e-liquid shortages that have plagued the vaping industry throughout 2020.
So, why are some vape juice flavors so hard to find in the first place? That’s what we’ll explain next.
The U.S. Flavored Pod Ban Changed Buying Habits
At the beginning of 2020, the U.S. government enacted a ban on most flavored vape pods and cartridges. With the ban in place, users of popular pod-based e-cigarettes such as JUUL suddenly couldn’t buy their favorite flavors anymore. Many of JUUL’s millions of users responded to the ban by switching to refillable vaping devices, which created a spike in demand for bottled vape juice.
The COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Buying Habits Again
With millions of vapers having migrated away from vaping devices with pre-filled pods, the demand for bottled e-liquid was already elevated when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The pandemic resulted in citywide shutdowns across the United States, with only essential businesses remaining open. Vape shops weren’t essential businesses, of course, which meant that a large portion of the available e-liquid inventory in the United States was stuck on the shelves of closed vape shops and wasn’t available for customers to buy.
Meanwhile, U.S. vapers – either because they couldn’t buy from their local vape shops or because they didn’t want to leave their homes – shifted their demand to online vape shops. Suddenly, online vape shops were handling higher order volumes than they had ever seen, and it wasn’t long before stocks began to dwindle.
Unprecedented Order Volumes Disrupted the E-Liquid Supply Chain
All at once, online vape shops in the United States found themselves running out of the most popular e-liquid brands and flavors and had to place large orders with their distributors. Distributors’ inventories began to wane, so the distributors then had to replenish their stocks by placing large orders with e-liquid manufacturers. With all of those high-volume orders, the supply side of the vaping industry became a major bottleneck. E-liquid manufacturers across the country ramped up their production as much as they possibly could, but for a long time, there simply wasn’t enough e-liquid available to meet the demand.
At this point, many of the larger e-liquid brands and distributors have sufficiently ramped up their production and inventory to satisfy demand. There is, however, one additional bottleneck that’s helping to prevent those products from reaching vape shops’ shelves and your hands in a timely fashion.
Carriers Across the World Are Struggling to Cope With Package Volume
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a fair bit of controversy these days surrounding the U.S. Postal Service and its workload. Packages are routinely being delivered late, with even Priority Mail shipments taking upwards of a week to arrive in some parts of the country. UPS and FedEx have experienced similar problems and have suspended their delivery time guarantees for some types of shipments.
The problem is that, a few months ago, millions of people across the country went into quarantine and decided to begin buying almost all of their goods online. Many of those people are continuing to buy online as much as possible in order to minimize unnecessary contact with others. With many people planning to participate in the U.S. elections by mail in November, it doesn’t seem likely that mail and package volumes will decrease any time soon. As in most other industries, slow deliveries have affected every part of the supply chain for the vaping industry.
Consumers Are Buying Extra E-Liquid to Prepare for the PMTA Deadline
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time for the American vaping industry. That’s because the industry was already at a legal crossroads with an important FDA compliance deadline looming in September.
By September, all e-liquid manufacturers must submit applications to the FDA for permission to continue selling their products. Compiling a premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per product, and the smallest businesses in the industry simply can’t bear that expense. Any e-liquid maker who doesn’t submit the required paperwork by September will need to stop selling products in the U.S.
The good news is that many larger vape juice makers do have the funds necessary to compile and submit PMTAs, and several companies have put out statements saying that their products will be in full legal compliance in September. The bad news, however, is that most vape juice brands haven’t said anything at all about their plans for the PMTA deadline. The uncertainty has led many vapers to place bulk orders out of fear that their favorite vape juice brands will be disappearing. The fact that so many vapers are ordering products in unusually high volumes has only served to put further strain on an already stretched supply chain.