Shipping lead times

ORPxxx order from 3rd July shipped today

That was the 23rd... Finally arrived today. Not impressed with 2nd Class RM....   1st class manages next day, 4 days for 2nd class is poor.

Morgaine, you'll be happy to know that UPS beat RM by about an hour today

selsinork wrote:

 

Morgaine, you'll be happy to know that UPS beat RM by about an hour today

Haha.

Well I don't mind who wins, it's not like I had shares in UPS (nor in anything else for that matter).  I'm happy with any service that provides tracking, uses dedicated package delivery vans, and achieves "next day" delivery reliably.

What is totally unacceptable to me is a package being delivered by the regular postman on his rounds, like my Pi was via 2nd Class Royal Mail.  I receive a sufficiently large number of misaddressed letters at home to know that other people are receiving some of mine as well, as a simple matter of statistics.  Human error is inevitable when the postman delivers vast numbers of items to multiple locations in the same street.  That absolutely will not do for any item ordered from Farnell, and that includes the Pi.

Morgaine.

So much for the pre-registered orders will be served first ... I still haven't gotten any info from element14 yet, like so many others. We registered long time ago, ordered weeks, some of us months ago, and nothing. You ordered 10 days ago and got your Raspberry Pi already??? What the?????? Seriously this is a horrible company, I can not understand how anyone would want to order something from these people here, customers are treated like ***, what a horrible company.

agree it's not good that people who've ordered a long time ago are still waiting.  Mind if I ask what country you're from ?   It would appear that if you're in the UK you're likely to get yours sooner, but we don't know why.  It also appears that 'consumer' orders i.e. ones with an ORPxxx style order number are slower to arrive.

In general element14 are a very good company and have excellent customer support - for business customers. However they're not Amazon..  So as I said earlier, if the option's available, order stuff from them as a business customer..

You can only order as business customer if you have a british sales tax business registration number if I see this right, so not an option for most people. I'm not in the UK, in Germany here. Shouldn't matter since they promised to work through the correct order and not randomly deliver to people who ordered just now ... If Element 14 makes only sense for business orders, then the Raspberry Pi Foundation should have never chosen them, since most customers for this product will obviously not be business customers.

The hazzle is just extreme and I had better customer support while living and ordering in 2nd world countries, far better (that's actually not a joke, I'm serious :-) ). I might very well consider to just cancel the whole Raspberry Pi idea and go with an alternative. A pi with taxes and these extremely high shipping costs, + a case and some other stuff makes the price rise fast. A SolidRun CuBox is still more expensive, but it's a dual core 800 Mhz Arm cpu (can run ubuntu) with 1Gb of Ram and it's also capable of 1080p video decoding. And the best thing about it, it's already available, and luckily somewhere else than here ...

I'm not so sure that "the company" actually exists as a coordinated entity, except as a legal fiction on some bit of paper.  The behavior that people are reporting is much closer to that of a loose federation of uncoordinated independent companies, isn't it?  The export.farnell.com site might well be the biggest step they've ever taken towards common action, and perhaps is being resisted tooth and nail as an intrusion on their local sovereignty.

Harriet Green may well have left after realizing that she had mistakenly taken up a position in the chicken farming business.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Support people at Element 14 aren't as mystified at what is going on as the customers.

Morgaine.

If it's actually a loose federation of uncoordinated independent companies, that makes it even worse as a choice. Then again, there are other loose (but not uncoordinated) independant companies which seem to get their act together way better :-)

You can only order as business customer if you have a british sales tax business registration number if I see this right, so not an option for most people.

That's not the case in the UK, anyone with credit card can use the business option. We know that's not the case in other countries though.  I don't really understand why it shouldn't be the same elsewhere within the EU.

I'm not so sure that "the company" actually exists as a coordinated entity, except as a legal fiction on some bit of paper. 

but at least within the EU it seems that everything (not just R-Pi) is delivered from the Leeds warehouse or the place in Belgium, so they're managing to coordinate well enough at some level. Granted, the problems seen with R-Pi are odd, especially from the perspective of those of us who've had excellent service from them over some number of decades..

From the website if I choose business instead of consumer (also if I choose UK as country, which wouldn't make sense since I don't live there)

"Business

If you do not already have a Trade Account with us, please note, you must be able to provide a Sales Tax (VAT) Registration number as proof of business status."

Just for fun I went to farnell Germany and clicked through business till i had to give more info, would say 64 days waiting time till dispatch ...