I don’t know if there is a good way to mitigate that more than Panic tried. They said they warned the provider in advance, the provider wasn’t ready. That’s a complication on the part of the Shopify platform and moving to a self-hosted/managed platform (like WooCommerce) might have solved the third-party shipping thing but would have then put the broader load balancing stuff at much higher risk.

The only way I think you could address it in retrospect would be to have separate launches for US and international — or at least separate allocations (using registration data from interested users and traffic before lead up to help make estimates on demand) of units, say 15,000 US units and 5,000 international or whatever, depending on how you want to mix it. That isn’t a perfect solution either and you can either over or under allocate, but it would probably appear to be more “fair” to international buyers.

But lbr, anyone buying stuff like this internationally is unfortunately always on the losing end. The same is true for US buyers who are after stuff primarily shipped in Europe or Asia or Oceania. It is unfortunate, but until you have the scale to truly have separate international storefronts and sales teams, people outside of the main market are always going to be lower on the list.