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Comment by ciguy | Hacker News Reader

Just wasted 20 minutes trying to figure out how to order. It kept saying no shipping rates found for my address. Turns out they aren't allowing US orders at the moment but they don't actually say that on the website you just get a cryptic shipping rates message. Not the greatest experience.

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As someone who just ordered one to the EU, you people in the US finally get a taste of your own medicine :)

I can't even recount how many times I've wanted to order something, and not until the final step before doing the payment they put up a "Sorry, we only accept orders within the US & Canada".

Wanna create a parcel bouncing service? One address here, one over there, charge for shipping and handling

We'd get a bulk discount on shipping sending containers of goods. But the sorting and re shipping sounds like Amazon level logistics

We will be a success if we have that scale of problems :)

Until the Flipper people realize that a crap ton of their devices are being shipped to the exact same EU address

I'd like to order one as well (EU, too), but I'm a bit repelled by the $35 tax on top of the price. Did you pay the same tax? Did you research whether you'll have to pay customs fees as well?

Order total: ~$300, where ~$50 is taxes and ~$50 is shipping. I did not research any customs fees, as I've been craving the device since I came across this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534257 (2 months ago), so don't really care about the custom fees.

It seems to be available from resellers, lab401 seems to be their official reseller in Europe: https://lab401.com/collections/flipper-zero

That's in fact a lot cheaper. Nice one, thanks!

Even though it states on web page on big letters, that it ships to Canada. It does not. Canada not available. (I suspect same with USA)

Well, if your fellow EU breatheren weren't such a hot spot for internet fraud.../s

Do these same fraudsters hit other EU online sites as much as they hit US based sites?

On the pre-order page, in bold, directly under the "buy now" button:

---

Shipping in August 2022. Currently available only for:

Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, French Polynesia, Germany, Greece, Vatican City, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom

More countries coming in September.

Not great but I’d cut them some slack. Designing hardware, software, a billing system, a website, production, shipping… I’m part of a two man hardware company and it’s a miracle it’s even possible.

The web is funny tho - an order page is just an order page - if it was built by a trillion dollar company or a startup barely paying rent - we go in with the same expectations.

I think they may be shipping from Russia, so that may be part of the problem.

They ship from Hong Kong

Not only that, but shipping to Russia has been it's own problem from the start of the project.

Disclaimer: I know some of the employees at Flipper. And a few Russian backers who still didn't get their device.

Probably not easy taking orders on a Russian website from the US right now?

The company was established in the US since at least 2019, so this is not an issue. They ship out of Hong Kong.

Does that mean this is legal to buy in the us, considering the sanctions against russia for the ukraine war? I want to buy one, but the legal status seems unclear to me.

The site lists countries where it is available.

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