Shipping questions, customer organized distribution in Europe

[steve]

Lots of questions.

 

Let me see if I can help with some basics.

 

We ship a 10 Pack  to Fremont California. 

 

Dimensions are  435mm x 371mm x 119mm 

I think the weight is on the order of 3kilo. An individual box weighs 237 gm.

 

The individual box is dimensioned thusly. 178mm  x 104mm x 84mm

 

just doing a quick check from UPS the shipment from the US for a single phone would be on the order of 70 USD

For 10 phones the bulk is on the order of 160USD, which mean 16USD per customer.

 

I picked a random EU city to just get a sense of things.

 

EU hub will happen in due course. When the costs of hubbing in the EU benefit our end users.

 

Steve

 

 

 

  _____  

From: community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org [mailto:community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org] On Behalf Of Erland Lewin
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2008 10:06 AM
To: List for Openmoko community discussion
Subject: Shipping questions, customer organized distribution in Europe

 

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/attachments/20080427/c99ac403/attachment.htm