It means that very little is in stock at Wildman for his yearly Black Friday sale. You'll get your prepaid order sometime next year.
C'mon, thats not true and you know that. Tim has an enormous amount of motors, hardware, and materials in stock right now, and generally as well. I was just there a few weeks ago and his stock looks like it usually is, high. Granted I didn't go around with a clipboard taking stock but when picking up an order(s), I always hang around and bother them and things looked normal. Lots of UPS by the door for pickup, motor shipments in the garage entrance, routers running, fiberglass everywhere.
The pre-order means that he takes orders and then places motor orders for Wildman Wednesdays and Black Saturday's in a large order. The motor vendors are usually producing the popular reloads in advance of all the vendors sales, to be ahead of production. Then the orders begin to get filled in as little as a few weeks, and out to a few months on the loads they make less often. This is all based on my experience placing relatively large orders for the past several years.
Tim has always had the caveat that if you need your orders ASAP, partials, or you need reloads ASAP. That he at times can and will pull your order from current stock. You can imagine though if all customers asked for this, it would decimate any vendors stock leading to not being able to fill weekly orders for quite some time.
Biggest thing is if you need some stuff ASAP, call him or put it in the order comments. Rarely would Tim and Jackie shoo away a customer that needed an order more urgently and if it was within their ability.
Most people generally begin receiving their orders around a month after the sales, then into late Jan, then into very early Spring, depending on what your order contains and when their orders come in from vendors.
Again, this is all based on my experiences in the past. Nothing to say it might be different based on other situations.