I understand the idea of selling direct to keep costs down but it makes prices overseas a little high.
e.g. for me in the UK an mbuino costs:
$10 for the board.
$10 international shipping
$2 import tax
£8 penalty for not paying the import tax before importing it
giving a total cost of just under $35.
OK so it’s not enough to break the bank but it’s hardly an attractive price either. Unless you can get a group together and buy in bulk to split the shipping and import penalty costs it’s simply not worth it.
Sure a UK reseller is going to add their margins but even if the price was $20 it would still be better than the current situation.
http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk based in the UK sell some GHI products too. But I think the outrageous circuits branded devices are handled differently so while they maybe able to get hold of GHI devices not listed on their catalog getting something like an mbuino or Retro could well be a different matter.
@ AndyA - Have the distributor contact us regarding OC products, the only thing to keep in mind is that there isn’t a distributor price break so they would more than likely raise the price to cover their costs and to make a profit.
@ AndyA - if the $10 board will have to go through distribution then the cost will end up being about the same as what your paid. Distributors need to pay shipping, warehouse, credit card processing, import…etc. the best way would be to group-order what you need.
Manufacturing a low volume board in USA and selling for only $10 is some dark magic! Try going to any assembly house in the USA and ask them for a quote for 100 mbuino boards the price below does not include the components cost, another $5 each.
A few back of the envelope numbers:
I can get GHI products through UK distributors with a markup of about 50% from your website list prices. (40% of that increase is tax)
I’m sure they get a distributor discount on the list price for regular GHI products, if we call that 30% then it works out that their retail price after tax is about twice what the boards cost them.
Assuming an mbuino doesn’t have that distributor discount that would put it at about $20.
For their markup to be a factor of 3.5 as you imply you would need to be offering distributor discounts of about 55% from the prices listed on your site. Maybe you do but that seems a little larger that I’d expect.
I’m not going to argue that selling a board made in low volume in the USA for $10 is easy, the company I used to work for in CA would have had trouble selling an empty box for that price, however that doesn’t mean that going through distribution should increase the price by 250%
There’s lots of talk about margin in hardware startups that basically says you need to sell a product at ~250% of your cost. Then that means you can still sell to a distributor at or above cost, and they can sell at retail the same price as you offer (obviously things like tax aside).
I was asking not long ago if there were any GHI employees in New Zealand, hoping to piggy back some orders on supply shipments, to reduce shipping costs here.
Perhaps if GHI made their own solar powered, long distance, quadcopter delivery drones, they could get the shipping down to us outlying gadgeteers…
If not, maybe forum users in various countries can group things on their own to save shipping? I know that doesn’t address the taxes/duties, but it can reduce the cost a little at least.
I’ve been “forced” (lol) to buy some GHI stuff from DFRobot.com, and take advantage of free shipping/no taxes on orders over $50 or so, but I don’t know if they ship free to the UK. And they only carry a small subset of GHI hardware (and their own gadgeteer modules) anyway.
RobotShop has also been good for low cost shipping internationally, but only if the order has been smallish. Once you start adding anything of size (like some mecanum wheels or something) the shipping balloons.
Does the UK charge import taxes on such small parcels? NZ determined that if the customs duties are less than $60 total, it costs more to collect them than to just waive them. So I just keep orders under $400 or so.
They never used to. But recently they’ve been charging duty on just about anything more than a Christmas card.
If all they did was charge the tax due I wouldn’t worry about it. If there was a local distributor I’d be paying the tax anyway. The annoying bit is that they then add a $13 handling fee* on because the tax wasn’t paid up front, for something costing about $65 the fee ends up effectively doubling the tax, for items worth less it’s worse than that.
Not a big deal for an expensive package but for items in the $10-$20 range you have to order a lot to make that fee insignificant.
(*The fee is actually £8 not some number of $ but it makes sense to keep everything in one currency and most people have a better feel for converting from US $ to their to their own currency than from £)
I found Mouser to be about the best option for GHI parts. They carry a wider range than any UK based supplier, the prices are better than any other UK supplier that I have found and you don’t get hammered with tax. They do charge something like £12 delivery for orders less than £40 though.
the price below does not include the components cost, another $5 each.