Pine64's $30 Linux Smartwatch Launches
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
With current shortages, PLEASE include "pre-order" rather than just "out-of-stock." There are a lot of items where I don't mind waiting, but I WILL forget. Here, the sealed watch is available, but the dev kit comes in September.
Why do I need to set a calendar reminder for September and then (perhaps) place an order? Can't I just pay now, and you'll deliver when it's ready (or refund if it's never ready)?
That's double true for things like graphics cards and other extreme shortages.
Aside from making it easier on me, YOU can plan demand. YOU can place appropriate manufacturing orders. If you have 1000 preorders, you can order 1200 devices. Otherwise, you'll be ordering 200, and find yourself out-of-stock again (or with a glut).
If the date, costs and shipping of the next batch aren't even known yet, it makes no sense to open up for preorders. Also, the company risks taking on more preorders than stock they can get their hands on, which will only help to disappoint customers who will have to wait more weeks for the next batch to arrive. There's a lot that can go wrong for the company.
If it took more than a few days to sell out for each batch, it might make sense because it'd allow for the store to be sure that their entire volume is moved. From what I've seen, these watches go out of stock in hours. There's no need for the store to carry risks to make ordering extra convenient for its customers because they will sell out regardless.
There's benefits for batching orders before you back order from the factory, but there's also downsides. From a business standpoint, I don't see the advantage of taking on back orders for a product that sells out instantly anyway.
If you're anxious to by the Pinetime, the hardware is practically the same as the Colmi P8 if I recall correctly, and the open source OS can be flashed on that with some extra steps you can find online. You can find that watch, and many similar ones, on your favourite Chinese import website. You lose the official support, but you'd get your hands on a hackable watch without setting a calender reminder.
Along with this some payment processors explicitly forbid pre-orders because of this. It can resulr in a lot of chargebacks aanf other issues when a product doesn't ship when originally estimated
My experience hasn't been that volume is manufacturing-limited. A frobitz costs $50 to make, ship, support, etc:
- I know I'll sell 200
- I think I might sell 800
- Best-case, I'll sell 1600
Without preorders, if I order 200 and sell for $60, I'll come out $2000 ahead guaranteed. If I order 800, I might come out $8000 ahead, or I might come out $28k behind. If I order 1600, I'll be almost guaranteed to come out behind.
Ergo, it makes more sense for me to order as many as I *know* I'll sell, and to have shortages than it does to order extra. Unsold units cost a lot, and can drive me bankrupt. Shortages are a bit of lost profit. That's especially true for low-volume, as is the case here.
This is true if you capture funds up front, but preorders don't necessarily _need_ to work like that.
There are payment types/options (at least in the UK) where you can pre-auth the payment but not actually capture the funds until later - so you technically don't have the customers' money.
You can also take refundable deposits (slightly more risky, but risk is mitigated by clear terms and conditions that you're not guaranteeing availability or a fixed delivery date). Even a low-value deposit can also be a very useful signal for "actual demand" which can be helpful for capacity planning.
Source: have run pre-ordering system for large volume sales online in the UK + as a customer I've recently paid a $10 deposit a few months ahead of a US product launching in Europe (only paying the full balance when they emailed me to say they were ready to ship).
Preorders can be a very nice gesture for customers, but they're no business necessity by any means. Implementing a new payment option (or, more likely, processor), setting up some kind of refund assurance system, dealing with customer support for cancellations, it all takes effort and time away from other parts of your business. I don't think the effort will be worth it until a shop can ship large enough volumes to need better capacity planning. From what I can tell, Pine seems to ship however many complete kits they can get their hands on. With the delays and issues in China/US shipping corridors, the availability of stock will probably be a bigger and more important issue to work on than the stock planning.
I appreciate supply may be the constraint rather than sales, but even more reason to lock in the sale now as best you can, as opposed to letting the customer go elsewhere in the meantime.
By the time your supply chain issues ease, sales then may become the constraint again (because people have moved on, the season has changed... whatever).
I don't discount your points about the time and effort required, but it doesn't seem clear cut to me that it's not worth doing.
How is this thing able to run Linux?
EDIT: Looks like its not, but I still dont see why it couldn't. May not be very useful though.
I agree that the article title really needs to remove "Linux" though. Hopefully it can be unflagged once the title is corrected.
And I'll probably get hit by customs, that's not good.