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Raspberri PI Release Announcement

raspberrypi.org

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Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#91

Post by Lewisham »

rmoriz wrote: post #89
lancefisher wrote: post #38

Fulfillment by Amazon would be awesome for this. Free two-day shipping and the site wouldn't go down. Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

how would they handle RMA? RMA for such devboards are very common, even the TI folks had several issues with the recent BeagleBone...

Amazon deals with this too. [1]

The TL;DR is that Amazon will take back units, and if they're marked as bad (presumably by the customer), Amazon holds on to them in their center, and can then ship them back to you.

It's basically exactly the same as normal retail.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_r...

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#92

Post by [deleted] »

learc83 wrote: post #11
handelaar wrote: post #7

And after they spent the past couple of weeks cockily batting away concerns about how they'd handle the traffic load, too. "You're all talking like we don't know what we're doing" is the line I recall being used several times.

They did seem to know what they were doing. They put up a temporary static site to handle the traffic. However, their suppliers, who are apparently fairly large companies, haven't been able to handle it. They said they warned them that the traffic would be enormous.

[deleted]

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#94

Post by polshaw »

I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?).

Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How insanely disorganised.

And 10K was also clearly never going to be close-- there were even far more forum members than this. I wouldn't be so grumpy if they didn't make me get up at 6AM for this crap.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#95

Post by lancefisher »

rmoriz wrote: post #89
lancefisher wrote: post #38

Fulfillment by Amazon would be awesome for this. Free two-day shipping and the site wouldn't go down. Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

how would they handle RMA? RMA for such devboards are very common, even the TI folks had several issues with the recent BeagleBone...

Amazon has a complete plan for returns, and handles them for you.

"Returned unit is added to your inventory and designated "Unfulfillable." You can create a removal order to have the unit returned to you."

You can read more here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Of course there is a cost to having Amazon handle everything, but I'd happily pay a little more for a board I could order through Amazon.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#96

Post by noonespecial »

DanBC wrote: post #93

BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme are talking about Raspberry PI right now. They haven't mentioned server problems yet, or the fact that it's sold out already. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm ) (7:45am Wednesday 29th Feb)

7:51: Now they have. Right after thought of the day. With a laugh.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#97

Post by waitwhat »

akavel wrote: post #85

On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors". The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it…

My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product.

So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#98

Post by Lewisham »

akavel wrote: post #85

On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors". The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it…

One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming.

It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.

Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#99

Post by Ecio78 »

polshaw wrote: post #94

I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?). Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How in…

"They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation"

I dont think Amazon is in the business of manufactoring hardware for others.

Re: Raspberri PI Release Announcement

#100

Post by DanBC »

Lewisham wrote: post #98
akavel wrote: post #85

On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors". The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it…

One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming. It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic compon…

They're both part of large international companies. This first shipment is disappointing to many people. Hopefully crashing the servers so hard will give both these distributors some idea of what the demand is, and they'll get some large production runs going, and shift some stock to international distribution partners.

> RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities.

RS is where you go when you have an account and need small amounts of components on a regular basis. Buying large quantities of components results in a very frustrating experience.

See, for example, the way they sell surface mount components. Buy qty 500 of 0805 SM resistors and Farnell will send you a strip of 500 while RS will sell you 50 little strips of 10 per strip. Or the way that individual parts are bagged.

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