121–130 of 273 posts
What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.
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Only that Amazon doesn't ship electronics to outside the US, and thus international customers wouldn't be able to get them. Since the Foundation is from the UK, they probably know that. Maybe they didn't go for the best option, but I always like to remind the US customers (who usually just don't honestly know about Amazon's restrictions) that buying electronics from them is a bad idea for the international market
Amazon has sites all over the world, including the UK, for which it also offers fulfillment services. I suspect the larger reason this hasn't been done yet is that it allows them to first take the orders and then scale the production run size to that.
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According to the blog at raspberrypi.org (currently offline) they are limiting orders to 1 per customer. So it will be interesting to see if this order goes through.
Yep - will be. I know a bunch of other local (Sydney Australia) people who placed orders for more than one via Farnell (Element14 here in .au), both online and by phone. I suspect if they've billed my credit card they'll honor the order/confirmation whatever the RPi org tells them.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290...
/Ya think?
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....
I'd imagine Amazon's services, whilst great, might cost more to use
Everyone in the US: The Raspberry Pi is now listed on Newark/element14 (Farnell's US site): http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943 It's $35, although there's also a 30 day lead time and a $20 handling fee (because it's shipping directly from the UK).
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Seems to me this is a _great_ reason to use Kickstarter. You get a solid core of pre-purchase data (complete with credit card billing info ready to rock) which lets you much more accurately gauge demand _before_ you need to finalise manufacture/logistics. I'm in the first batch of the ZPM Espresso machines via Kickstarted, which blew out past their expectations by an order of magnitude, and allowed them the opportuni…
Sadly, Kickstarter isn't an option for most people outside the US, as you need a US bank account to draw the funds into. A limitation with their Amazon payments system I believe.