Shipping questions, customer organized distribution in Europe

[Erland Lewin]

In preparation for The Big Day, I have some questions about how the shipping
from OpenMoko will work.

How much does one package (with a single phone) weigh (approximately)? What
will its dimensions be?

There's been talk about a hub in Europe, has that idea been scrubbed? IF
not, will it be in place in time for the first shipments?

When ordering directly from OpenMoko to Europe, how much will shipping cost
for a 10-pack? Would that package come from the US, China or Taiwan (just
curious)? How much would shipping be for 24 10-packs (approximately 235
phones have been noted for Europe on the Community purchase wiki page)?

If OpenMoko doesn't set up a hub in Europe, I wonder if it would make sense
for us consumers to do our own hub-like distribution. Using prices from the
Swedish postal service (which is probably not one of the cheapest in
Europe), if a single phone package weighs between 500 g and 1 kg, it would
cost €24 to send as an insured letter to other European countries. Not all
that expensive, I think.

Distribution would probably be even less expensive if we order one package
to the country in Europe with the lowest postal rates (maybe combined with a
low VAT), then ship phones to one person in each country in the city/region
with most buyers, who then posts them domestically to each buyer in other
parts of his country, and maybe hands them out to buyers in his own city.

The biggest difficulty would probably be that this would involve a lot of
money (over 50 kEUR), and increase the trust required for all this to work.
How much we would save on the shipping would be a factor involved in whether
this would be worth the trouble.

Buying directly from OpenMoko would probably not provide us with a
particularly good guarantee, so some European buyers might prefer to buy
from European resellers.

If we could get the shipping costs (which should be known by now?), we could
do some calculations.

/Erland
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