Farnell no longer ships to France

[williamhbell]

Hi,

While I bought two Raspberry Pi computers from fr.farnell.com, they no longer ship to France. First they changed the order page from French to English and now they blocked it altogether,

http://farnell.com/raspberrypi-consumer ... ailers.php

Now it just says:

"France - Coming Soon"

Several people here would like to order a Raspberry Pi, but cannot do so via Farnell.

Regards,

Will

P.S. Farnell export and our CERN contact for Farnell have been emailed to try to fix this quickly.

[williamhbell]

Hi,

The CERN Farnell rep. just replied to say that the problem should be fixed at the end of this week.

Regards,

Will

[williamhbell]

Hi,

Here is an update from Farnell:

Malheureusement, en raison de la loi du consommateur en France nous ne pouvons pas vendre au consommateurs en ce moment. Nous cherchons d'un revendeur de qui vous pouvez acheter un Raspberry Pi. S'il vous plait continuez a regarder notre site-web pour les nouvelles informations.

rough translation:

Unfortunately, due to the consumer law in France, we cannot sell to consumers at the moment. We are looking for a distributor which can buy Raspberry Pis. Please continue to watch our web site for new information.

Regards,

Will

[williamhbell]

Hi,

Thanks to the efforts of the Farnell CERN rep. et al., fr.farnell.com now leads to:

http://www.kubii.fr/

which is their official sub-distributor in France.

Regards,

Will

[williamhbell]

Hi,

It looks like they are selling Raspberry Pi computers for 47 dollars (before tax and shipping) rather than 35 dollars. The price in Euros is 36.99, which is 47 dollars. Shipping is 14.35 Euros. Adding taxes in, the total is 51.34 Euros. Better to be able to buy them in France though.

Regards,

Will

[Frog Pi]

Hello,

Don't you think that price is unreasonably high, especially the postage ? I paid less that €40 from RS, though I do realise that they currently have a rather long lead time.

[williamhbell]

Hello,
Don't you think that price is unreasonably high, especially the postage ? I paid less that €40 from RS, though I do realise that they currently have a rather long lead time.

Hi,

Yes, it is quite a lot of money considering Farnell were charging 29.03 Euros before tax (34.72 Euros after tax) and did not charge for shipping. I did some pricing for French schools in the region based on the original figures which are now way off.

à bientôt,

Will

[exartemarte]

Tandy apparently has stock of Rev1/256MB boards at a small discount (£27.99 incl VAT), and ships to France.

[Frog Pi]

Tandy apparently has stock of Rev1/256MB boards at a small discount (£27.99 incl VAT), and ships to France.

That could be interesting. They are charging £5 for delivery making a total of £32.99; approximately €41.25.

[Frog Pi]

I ordered one from Tandy last Monday evening and received it in the west of France today (Monday). It was adequately packed in a small cardboard box inside a padded envelope and sent by post (airmail). It is a Farnell unit and is working perfectly with the SD card that was running in my first RasPi. All in all, a good customer experience.

[williamhbell]

Hi,

While Tandy's service is good, their site is just in English. There are some people in France who do not speak English very well. I had a long discussion with our Farnell rep. about this, but nothing has been done to provide a French version of the Raspberry Pi page. I know about google translate, but a lot of people do not.

The amusing thing about google.fr is that it finds,

(1)
http://fr.farnell.com/jsp/displayProduc ... price=true
which is in French and allows one to directly order at a cheaper price 34.72 euros after tax (29.03 before tax). This is 37.18 dollars (not 35 dollars), but close than the sub-distributors price.

(2)
http://snootlab.com/lang-fr/raspberry-p ... 12-mb.html
37.95 euros after tax, but sold out.

However, typing "Raspberry Pi" into the search box brings up an English page, (it is the same page for the UK, FR, or Swiss versions of Farnell). Why they cannot use French or German I do not know. (The commercial pages of farnell.fr are in French. The commercial pages of farnell.ch are in French and German.)

Selecting France from the list, and admitting you are not a company (the French only clients would have followed the google link though), brings one to

http://www.kubii.fr/

The moral of the story, if you don't speak English you can buy a cheaper Pi in France since you can happily avoid the "Consumer, ORDER NOW" button by following the google.fr link.

Regards,

Will

[Frog Pi]

Hello Will,

The link to the French Farnell page is a good find; I'll check that out next time I am looking to increase my RasPi collection and will also point potential purchasers in that direction.

In my experience the French people I know who are interested in the Raspberry Pi are more put off by the device availability than by the language of the web pages. I have a colleague who ordered from RS several weeks ago expecting delivery around now only to find that he will be lucky to get it before Xmas. He would happily have ordered on any English website able to deliver in a reasonable timescale. Having said that, a French language site would be even better.

Chris