fanoush wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2020 6:31 pm
W. H. Heydt wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2020 4:38 pm
fanoush wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2020 8:35 am
The rest is self regulation because nobody wants to sell stuff for no profit.
You keep saying that, but it's not true. There is profit at all stages of the retail chain. It's just that there isn't very much profit. It is, so far as anyone here can tell, the thin profit that Farnell and RS objected to and thereby declined to carry the Pi0 line.
This is nitpicking. Even If I would replace "no profit" for "very little profit so it is not worth it" it would not change the meaning of what I wrote.
It makes a difference because "no profit" would be selling at cost, with nothing to cover overhead. Selling for "very little profit" covers at least nominal overhead.
What is actually done on the part of the companies that sell Pi0s and Pi0Ws is that they try to get people to buy kits where they have a higher profit margin on the rest of the stuff in the kit. Alternatively, they hope that someone buying a Pi0 will also buy other stuff. The former doesn't make much sense for most customers (the ones that have those other items or know where to get them at less cost), while the later approach is adopted by at least some customers as a means to spread shipping and handling costs over more items. This is sometime done by buying other items and then just adding a Pi0 to the order as at that point the shipping on the Pi0 is--essentially--free of charge.
However maybe we also disagree on definition of profit. Hypothetically if I would get each Zero for $4.50 and sell it at $5, you may call that $0.5 difference as "There is profit It's just that there isn't very much of it".
That would be gross profit. Sometimes called gross margin. At, for retail, 11% *is* a very low gross margin. Typical retail markup is on the order of 50%.
For me profit is what you can keep after you subtract cost of doing business (e.g. accepting card payment, printing invoice, handling/packing the item, handling some known percentage of returns and lost packages and related support cost and refunds, ... basically everything to keep lights on and business sustainable). So if this cost me in average more that $0.5 per customer order I would call it "there is no profit". Maybe this is where we disagree.
That is net profit.
Whether $0.50 gross profit is enough to keep your net profit above zero will depend on how well you run your business. I think you will find that most Pi0 vendors also sell many items with a gross profit well below $0.50 each and still make a net profit on those items.
BTW I was the one who asked for clarification of 'one Zero per order' vs 'one Zero per person ever' because it happened to me that seller cancelled my second order of Pi Zero done few weeks after the first one. At that time the state of things was officially described as "one per order because there is high demand so that everyone can get one soon".
The official policy has always been "one per person, ever". In practice, that is unenforceable for most vendors, and with a little ingenuity on the part of a customer, not enforceable at all for any company. How do you check for second sales? Name? Address? CC number? There are easy ways around all of those. The ways around may be more trouble that just ordering from a vendor that doesn't try to enforce the policy, but they exist anyway. In any case, everybody I've ever ordered a Pi0 or Pi0W from has no issues with making another order for one. Enforcing one board per order is easy, where enforcing one per person is hard to impossible....and as your experience shows, likely counterproductive.
That shop lost me forever. It was worth the shop owner to do it and one of reasons he gave me is that by selling second Zero to me for $5 he is losing money. He had to answer my emails, cancel the payment and did not let it be even if I explained politely that I did not know exact rule and won't do it third time and will likely buy next Pi there. I bought several Pis there before, last being Pi2 before this happened. He still canceled it. So from this personal experience I have a reason to believe that even your sentence "There is profit at all stages of the retail chain. It's just that there isn't very much profit." is quite unlikely to be true. So that's why I keep saying that
There are more possibilities... The store owner may not run a very efficient business. He may spend too much time tracking orders and telling people "no" when just filling the order would cost him less. Personally, I think your point of stopping doing business with him and telling him why is the most effective thing to do. Then when he goes out of business for lack of customers (having ticked off too many of them), perhaps someone else will start a business and have a more reasonable attitude.
