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Comment by lancefisher | Hacker News Reader

Fulfillment by Amazon would be awesome for this. Free two-day shipping and the site wouldn't go down.

Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

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Only that Amazon doesn't ship electronics to outside the US, and thus international customers wouldn't be able to get them. Since the Foundation is from the UK, they probably know that.

Maybe they didn't go for the best option, but I always like to remind the US customers (who usually just don't honestly know about Amazon's restrictions) that buying electronics from them is a bad idea for the international market

Amazon has sites all over the world, including the UK, for which it also offers fulfillment services.

I suspect the larger reason this hasn't been done yet is that it allows them to first take the orders and then scale the production run size to that.

All over the world? They've got sites in 9 countries.

For most people in the US, that it is all over the world! </sarc>

And beyond

From my perspective the US is "international"

Estimate demand, send X% of your initial production run (probably more than half) to Amazon, send the rest to international suppliers.

While it would have been a good idea to distribute some of the devices from the US that wasn't the main problem. A common way to do a launch like this is:

1. Make people register with their e-mail adress. 2. Send order links with unique and expiring tokens in batches. 3. Process payments.

Also, and this is from a naive perspective, I'd imagine the deal they have cut with their distributors gives them a greater share of the profit (the R-PI foundation is a charity remember)

I'd imagine Amazon's services, whilst great, might cost more to use

how would they handle RMA? RMA for such devboards are very common, even the TI folks had several issues with the recent BeagleBone...

Amazon deals with this too. [1]

The TL;DR is that Amazon will take back units, and if they're marked as bad (presumably by the customer), Amazon holds on to them in their center, and can then ship them back to you.

It's basically exactly the same as normal retail.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_r...

Amazon has a complete plan for returns, and handles them for you.

"Returned unit is added to your inventory and designated "Unfulfillable." You can create a removal order to have the unit returned to you."

Of course there is a cost to having Amazon handle everything, but I'd happily pay a little more for a board I could order through Amazon.

But amazon doesnt make stuff like RS and Farnells do

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