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Comment by wriq | Hacker News Reader

Shipped ≠ Sales

Yes, but motorola doesn't own any retail stores unlike Apple. So they don't have visibility into sales until a couple of months. Unless you are looking at a very high return rate, it is a good proxy for sales.

You forgot the existence of a very high sitting-on-the-shelf rate.

You can ship all the units you want, but unless people are taking them home, the number is definitely not a good proxy for sales.

Well sure, I mean there is always the possibility that there is channel stuffing. But why take the pessimistic view that all the shipped tablets are on the shelf when you don't have any information. Things to note --

1. at amazon.com, the only site I have been tracking the tablets in actual sales, the Xoom is either #1 or #2 in tablet sales over the past two months. I mean, it is ahead of even the iPad 2 that is supposed to supply constrained. So all the guys who stood in line and brought iPad2's so they could sell for a markup -- finding it difficult to sell even for a $100 premium -- compared to the flop show that is the Xoom. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1232597011/... (this keeps changing, so don't hold me to it).

2. the wifi model is flying off the shelf at some of the local retailers. did someone earlier mention out of stock situation in Canada?

3. the wifi was introducted on Mar 26th, a couple of days before their quarter ended

4. more channels and price points are yet to be introduced.

1. More people, I think, are likely to buy an iPad from Apple.com rather than Amazon.com, so the fact that Xoom is higher-rated than iPad there doesn't mean much. IMO.

2. I have yet to see one in Canada, but I'm not really looking. However, it's certainly possible that people are always out of stock because they're only ordering 1 - 3 of them and there's definitely people out there who will buy things because they're not from Apple.

3. Granted.

4. If they're having problems with the channels and price points they have already, they're not likely to do much better outside. Motorola's built on the mobile phone channel. Building up a channel outside of your niche is hard.

> But why take the pessimistic view that all the shipped tablets are on the shelf when you don't have any information.

Because that is the default, conservative position to take. The null hypothesis, if you will.

>> 1. at amazon.com, the only site I have been tracking the tablets in actual sales, the Xoom is either #1 or #2 in tablet sales over the past two months. I mean, it is ahead of even the iPad 2

Amazon itself doesn't sell the iPad. It is only sold through Amazon via 3rd party merchants for a huge markup. Obviously sales are going to be low on Amazon when the cheapest price is $130 over the price in the Apple Store or other authorized resellers like macconnection.com.

It's amazing that the iPad is on Amazon's best seller list at all, since it doesn't make any financial sense to buy an iPad on Amazon.

Interestingly, when I was in San Francisco I had to look in 3-4 different stores before I found one with Xooms in stock, the others had all sound out apart from the display unit.

I guess SF is a fairly large outlier when it comes to tech products though.

Personally I'm very happy with mine; the browser is definitely rather buggy right now but that's it - apart from that the software is great.

A store can sell out of anything if it only had a half dozen in stock to begin with. This is especially the case if the store doesn't have an agreement with the supplier to return any unsold stock after N days. (This kind of free lunch hedging is probably how most units were shipped, if this 25k units-sold floor is true.)

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