Check new tweets from Rpi on their account, maybe they'll give some hint http://twitter.com/raspberry_pi (btw it looks like the Raspberry Pi release has "slashdotted" their sites)
These are supposedly the links, though both sites are down. The third was just an "express an interest" page, as the supplier didn't yet have the appropriate page up.
It's reasonable to assume that even though both companies were warned that traffic to their sites would skyrocket they probably wouldn't have invested in any new infrastructure to just support one new product - probably more of a 'take note, grin and bear it' stance.
At work now (an electronics/tech company) - just been passed a message from our Farnell accounts manager; they're talking mid April for orders placed now. Looks like I may get my personal one (as above) first.
Waiting for info from our RS accounts manager - RS seem a little less briefed about the whole thing - hmmm.
Oh, yes - it bears repeating that RS are (and always have been) trade only and are very unlikely to take orders from individuals - for many, Farnell will be the better bet.
And after they spent the past couple of weeks cockily batting away concerns about how they'd handle the traffic load, too. "You're all talking like we don't know what we're doing" is the line I recall being used several times.
They did seem to know what they were doing. They put up a temporary static site to handle the traffic.
However, their suppliers, who are apparently fairly large companies, haven't been able to handle it. They said they warned them that the traffic would be enormous.
Obviously people were only expressing concern because they were interested in purchasing reliably, not because they were worried about Rpi's server uptime numbers. It's a little trollish for them to blame their distributors and say "Our site is fine".
Imagine that you're one of these companies and someone says, "We have 5,000 units for you. We expect that they will sell out in a few hours if you limit them to one per customer."
Do you think that (a) they are being realistic about their customers or that (b) your servers will be unable to handle the load described by that scenario or (c) neither or (d) both?
Supplier 1: RS Components redirected to a product interest page - no purchase option
Supplier 2: Premier Farnell redirected to a international region picking page with no US link - no purchase option
Traffic wasn't the real problem. People are familiar with lines and queues- I wait in a slow long line every time I go to the grocery store.
Seems like they simply did not test their launch with either distributer internationally. Combine that with months of hype and last minute server/traffic arrogance for an angry social mob.
Seems to me this is a _great_ reason to use Kickstarter. You get a solid core of pre-purchase data (complete with credit card billing info ready to rock) which lets you much more accurately gauge demand _before_ you need to finalise manufacture/logistics.
I'm in the first batch of the ZPM Espresso machines via Kickstarted, which blew out past their expectations by an order of magnitude, and allowed them the opportunity to re-jig production methods and schedules, based on ordering 10 times as many parts as expected.
Sadly, Kickstarter isn't an option for most people outside the US, as you need a US bank account to draw the funds into. A limitation with their Amazon payments system I believe.
True, but I'd bet a person-on-the-ground in the US would have been a fair bit less organisation that the deals they did with RS/Farnell. (See NinjaBlocks for an example - they're a bunch of local-to-me-in-Sydney-Australia guys who got a contact/partner in the US to manage their Kickstarter rego for them)
Setting up a US bank account for a non-US resident isn't all that hard. Worst case for most major US banks is that you might need to get a notarized copy of your passport and the application form, which can cost you a bit (first time I did it, years ago, the local US consulate charged me $65 for it).
You likely have to have identity documents certified, that's about it. A visit to a US consulate (check first if the provide the required services) or notary public should be able to help get the right stamps and/or seals to satisfy them.
None that I've dealt with have required that. They do require to verify that you are who you claim you are, and without a US address you might find that requires extra paperwork (such as getting official proof of address and identity document certified by a US consulate or a notary public), and some banks might just not want to deal with the hassle. You also do need to fill out forms to establish your tax withholding.
I've held personal and business accounts with Chase and TD Bank, as well as trader accounts with a couple of brokerages, and the documentation requirements were pretty basic in all cases. I've looked into opening accounts at other banks at various points too.
In some cases the easiest alternative is to simply buy an off the shelf US corporation, and have the company that sets it up register a US bank account for it. That's certainly often less paperwork and hassle than dealing with a personal account, especially if you set up a Delaware corporation.
That's a good alternative, but then I'd have to pay accountants and lawyers and the rest... It does give you flexibility in other areas, though (such as, I will finally be able to open a Stripe account!).
Have you tried this recently? It's practically impossible, thanks to money-laundering paranoia. The closest I got was Western Union, but they said the account couldn't be used for any kind of internet commerce.
Yes, I have, with TD Bank. Didn't run into any problems at all.
If you run into problems, buy an off the shelf Delaware corporation online, with a registered agent, and create the account for that. Bonus, depending on where you do business you can potentially save quite a bit of tax by structuring things properly that way.
If I'm reading it right, tonight will be the first batch of 10k, the 'later in 2012' release that we will be able to pre-order for will be from their licensed partners and not so limited in quantity.
I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
"Starting in a month or so, you will be able to place batch orders with both Premier Farnell and RS Components for as many units as you want; you’ll also save some money on postage by doing this."
Farnell had a product site up at launch time. When I first clicked "Add to Basket" I got a "Could not determine product stock, please try again" error. The second time just some AjaxError. And then the whole shopping cart crashed. Now they are serving a "Site unavailible" Page. I really wonder if they managed to sell all the stock before the page was DDOS'ed.
I'd wager that a non-insignificant % of the people scrambling to order want to get their hands on one to flip it on eBay. Watch what happens when they start shipping.
And if someone needs one this week instead of waiting 2-3 weeks, then they're free to spend $300. Otherwise the seller is just playing to buyer's stupidity. Oh well.
I think it's going to be longer than 2-3 weeks to get one.
Regardless, I don't see what the urgency is. If there's something you need to develop on an embedded ARM SoC, there are plenty of other more available (and less publicized) options.
I dont think so, if you need ethernet connection you need to buy an external lan/wifi card, spend at least a couple of bucks (3$ if you are lucky?)), lose one usb port (or use an usb hub), hope it will work in your OS, just to save some bucks (10-3 = 7$). For me, no way
Eh, you seem to be able to get dirt-cheap USB b/g/n adapters too these days, though they're presumably 2.4 GHz only and who knows what the ARM Linux support is like for them.
The production partnerships are encouraging news. Here's hoping my predictions on the Pi being more of a boutique/hobby venture that couldn't meet demand are wrong. I never thought they had much of a chance 10k at a time with weeks in between runs.
Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.
They've used a classic software engineering technique to solve a manufacturing problem — just add an additional abstraction layer. I'm thrilled they'll have more capacity but also a little sad I can't pick a few up at the Jameco will-call desk tomorrow.
I was able to see RS and "register my interest", but apparently that doesn't equate to buying one. Then of course the Raspberry Pi team tweet that we're "on the wrong page" without even investigating the issue first.
Man, I looked at Twitter, replied to someone, and went off to do something else like ONE MINUTE before the "hey you can buy the pi now" tweet. Twenty minutes later both the people ready to sell me one were totally swamped.
Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive!
You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.
I think you would have to already have an account with one of the distributors to stand a chance. It's hard enough to get one page to load, but I would guess registering and placing an order would involve at least 5 clicks.
Yes, dying from success is never the desired outcome, but at least they managed to send a first batch, which will be reviewed, will increase the hype, and hopefully give them a second chance to do things right and stock some more units
Or it could tarnish their reputation and kill the whole product. Lets hope the engineering of the actual product is a little better than the sales process. But I still think its kind of important not to give your potential customers a 404 as your first interaction or you run the very real risk of having zero conversions from all that homepage traffic.
> you run the very real risk of having zero conversions
> from all that homepage traffic.
Dear God. Don't use web-y start-up lingo in situations where none of the platitudes apply. R-PI faces demand severely outstripping demand, which is the polar opposite of what conversion rate-optimizing Bla-ly companies experience.
probably it's just a fixed message they have on their system (load balancers?) that pops up when the real webservers are meltin^H^H^H^H^H^H not responding :)
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.
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.
If their forums were up, you'd see that they said that they have no plans for U.S. distribution anytime soon.
In addition, the HDMI support means you are locked into a T.V., or a computer monitor with HDMI which isn't as common, and the ARM architecture means most of the pre-built code out there won't run on it.
I was caught up in the hype too originally thinking of everything I would do with it, but basically, it is a slow computer without a case that will have few OS options, few software options, and that you could connect to a T.V. While there is much you could do with that, it certainly puts it into perspective.
A better option for most would be to find a used computer on Craigslist or eBay. However, if you live in the UK and are truly interested in a small ARM computer and have everything else you need to use it, go for it. I won't.
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
But here in the Netherlands you can order anything your heart desires either on Amazon UK or Germany. I'd imagine it would be the same for other EU countries. So that part of the world would be covered at least.
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
Probably no more than a curiosity, but http://cn.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=2081... (Farnell's China site) will show you the product page. Even Google Translate seems to be slashdotted, so I'm not going to try to get through that checkout process.
What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.
The tweets from the foundation make it look more like Farnell actually took about 10 minutes to sell what they had. Nobody's quite sure whats up with RS yet.
Then I blame their fucked up shop system with yet another site for every other region? All I can say is that one minute after launch, the product page on Farnell was showing "out of stock". After that, the site never loaded again.
Apparently the only way you could actually get one is through some back of the woods partner site of them in Australia. Hooray.
I managed to get a confirmation for an order of two through the Australian Element14 site - it took a dozen or so reloads to get the product into the cart, then almost an hour to get through the payment process (I was already registered from previous purchases).
According to the blog at raspberrypi.org (currently offline) they are limiting orders to 1 per customer. So it will be interesting to see if this order goes through.
Yep - will be. I know a bunch of other local (Sydney Australia) people who placed orders for more than one via Farnell (Element14 here in .au), both online and by phone. I suspect if they've billed my credit card they'll honor the order/confirmation whatever the RPi org tells them.
I think this is a great success for RPi. Demand exceeded expectations. They always said the first batch would be 10,000 in size, and that's been eaten up in minutes (or probably seconds).
I would rather they had a small initial run first, that didn't take so long to get to market, and allowed them to test the waters tentatively. The alternative would have been to take a much larger risk, longer lead time, and bigger upfront cost to make a bigger batch.
We're always advocating that companies should ship small and early and then iterate to refine their product. This is a MVP from them. If I was involved I would be extremely proud and overjoyed at this.
all the complainers should take a step back and relax. What's the worst that has happened because you couldn't get you hands on this just yet? It's not as though you have lost money, missed deadlines, or anything else. Just give the consumerism a rest for a while.
As for RS Components' and Farnell's reputation as businesses...
PS. I did get up at 6am to try and order a board, but wasn't too disappointed when I couldn't get on the RS website. I can wait another month or so.
I'm sorry, but I don't know what Raspberri PI is. The site literally doesn't tell me anything about the actual product. I see an image of an arduino-like board -- is that it?
Not being snotty or anything, I just literally can't find any information on the site.
After 25 minutes on hold with RS, I spoke to an agent. She was (understandably) a bit flustered, so this might not be correct, but what I gathered was:
* She couldn't take an order
* They weren't going to be able to take an order today
* What I should be doing is "registering an interest" online when the website comes back up
* Noone had ordered anything today, although a few had managed to register an interest before the website melted
The one I just spoke to said they are waiting for managers to come in to sort out what's going on, so far they don't even have stock numbers and all they know about this product is what's shown on their own website.
The first batch was limited to 10K units. Their logic was probably that the most devoted fans would take the time to get up early, and the rest would buy from the subsequent batches.
"But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadhttp://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-ras...
http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-H...
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html
however It seems to be a 'coming soon' product.
Goods Subtotal: £26.55 Basic Shipping: £0.00 VAT: £5.31 Total: £31.86
--->>> Further stock available in 30 days
I'll believe it when I have the board in my hands though!
Order confirmation email just come in:
Description
SBC, RASPBERRY PI, MODEL B
Qty Ordered 1
Qty to Follow 1
Estimated Delivery W/C 12/03/2012
That's 12th March for our foreign friends -at least I hope its not 3rd Dec!!
Waiting for info from our RS accounts manager - RS seem a little less briefed about the whole thing - hmmm.
Oh, yes - it bears repeating that RS are (and always have been) trade only and are very unlikely to take orders from individuals - for many, Farnell will be the better bet.
However, their suppliers, who are apparently fairly large companies, haven't been able to handle it. They said they warned them that the traffic would be enormous.
Do you think that (a) they are being realistic about their customers or that (b) your servers will be unable to handle the load described by that scenario or (c) neither or (d) both?
Supplier 1: RS Components redirected to a product interest page - no purchase option
Supplier 2: Premier Farnell redirected to a international region picking page with no US link - no purchase option
Traffic wasn't the real problem. People are familiar with lines and queues- I wait in a slow long line every time I go to the grocery store.
Seems like they simply did not test their launch with either distributer internationally. Combine that with months of hype and last minute server/traffic arrogance for an angry social mob.
I'm in the first batch of the ZPM Espresso machines via Kickstarted, which blew out past their expectations by an order of magnitude, and allowed them the opportunity to re-jig production methods and schedules, based on ordering 10 times as many parts as expected.
I've held personal and business accounts with Chase and TD Bank, as well as trader accounts with a couple of brokerages, and the documentation requirements were pretty basic in all cases. I've looked into opening accounts at other banks at various points too.
In some cases the easiest alternative is to simply buy an off the shelf US corporation, and have the company that sets it up register a US bank account for it. That's certainly often less paperwork and hassle than dealing with a personal account, especially if you set up a Delaware corporation.
I'd love to be proved wrong on this.
If you run into problems, buy an off the shelf Delaware corporation online, with a registered agent, and create the account for that. Bonus, depending on where you do business you can potentially save quite a bit of tax by structuring things properly that way.
To me this is the key point. No need to fight through the rush tonight, there will enough to go around.
I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
"Starting in a month or so, you will be able to place batch orders with both Premier Farnell and RS Components for as many units as you want; you’ll also save some money on postage by doing this."
I'd wager that a non-insignificant % of the people scrambling to order want to get their hands on one to flip it on eBay. Watch what happens when they start shipping.
Regardless, I don't see what the urgency is. If there's something you need to develop on an embedded ARM SoC, there are plenty of other more available (and less publicized) options.
Edit: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M... ; $999 on buy it now ...
Edit 2: There's also this, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M..., which is interesting - must be against ebay policy to sell things you don't own?
So the extra $10 will only buy you an ethernet and spare USB port now; makes the $35 a harder sell (but not tonight, of course).
Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.
Most annoying.
I think they've been a bit busy...
Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive!
You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.
This is YC, right? I don't think that the word "conversion" is a platitude. It just has more syllables than the word "sale", and... ok, you're right.
Wait, that makes no sense, I can't see that at all, nevermind.
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....
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...
"Returned unit is added to your inventory and designated "Unfulfillable." You can create a removal order to have the unit returned to you."
You can read more here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
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.
1. Make people register with their e-mail adress. 2. Send order links with unique and expiring tokens in batches. 3. Process payments.
In addition, the HDMI support means you are locked into a T.V., or a computer monitor with HDMI which isn't as common, and the ARM architecture means most of the pre-built code out there won't run on it.
I was caught up in the hype too originally thinking of everything I would do with it, but basically, it is a slow computer without a case that will have few OS options, few software options, and that you could connect to a T.V. While there is much you could do with that, it certainly puts it into perspective.
A better option for most would be to find a used computer on Craigslist or eBay. However, if you live in the UK and are truly interested in a small ARM computer and have everything else you need to use it, go for it. I won't.
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
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.
I'd imagine Amazon's services, whilst great, might cost more to use
Apparently the only way you could actually get one is through some back of the woods partner site of them in Australia. Hooray.
http://au.element14.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-chipset/chipse...
Weirdly that link lists prices for more than one board; RaspberryPI made it very clear that the initial batch was "one per customer".
The $AUD is worth more than the $US, but tech goods always cost more in Australia than they should.
I would rather they had a small initial run first, that didn't take so long to get to market, and allowed them to test the waters tentatively. The alternative would have been to take a much larger risk, longer lead time, and bigger upfront cost to make a bigger batch.
We're always advocating that companies should ship small and early and then iterate to refine their product. This is a MVP from them. If I was involved I would be extremely proud and overjoyed at this.
all the complainers should take a step back and relax. What's the worst that has happened because you couldn't get you hands on this just yet? It's not as though you have lost money, missed deadlines, or anything else. Just give the consumerism a rest for a while.
As for RS Components' and Farnell's reputation as businesses...
PS. I did get up at 6am to try and order a board, but wasn't too disappointed when I couldn't get on the RS website. I can wait another month or so.
I'd imagine traffic to their website on a normal day is relatively low. Even though they're worldwide companies, their market is pretty niche.
Not being snotty or anything, I just literally can't find any information on the site.
There's usually more at their site, they went static about a half hour ago because of the load on their servers.
They tweeted at 6am to link to the page, then not since.
Farnell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews
They at least tweeted at 6.30 to say they are trying to fix the problems.
"But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."
(but the servers are still melting, so the buy links weren't working)