I'm happy to answer any questions around this! We've been working on this since update since we launched the product last year, so we're excited to be able to share it today.
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Right now, in Europe it's only available in a handful of countries (5 of 27). I'm in Spain, and I see I can spec a perfect machine and get it delivered just over the border in France, but I can't get the same thing delivered here just a couple of hours away, which is very surprising! My understanding was the single market & customs union etc should make going from 1 to N EU countries pretty easy.
Is this due to smoe regulatory issues, or needing to organize shipping differently for every country, or waiting to include an ñ key, or something else?
Right now, I'm very seriously looking at ordering one, renting a PO box in France and shipping the laptop here myself, which seems a bit ridiculous.
Amazon might make it look easy but it really isn't (and Amazon is not available in all EU countries either!).
Logistics is more then just shipping, but also returns, repairs, availability, shipping time, shipping costs, where and how to keep stock. And this points affect each other, i.e. they might not have enough supply to sell to the whole EU market etc.
Lastly while there is a free marked in the EU if I remember correctly there are still some differences when importing things from outside into the EU depending on the country of entry. Like how to fill forms and which companies you can work with (for what prices) in given country.
They gave a IMO good overview of the difficulties of selling to a new country in a previous post :
> With our supply improving, you may be wondering when you can order a laptop if you’re outside of the US and Canada. We selected and are bringing up our worldwide warehousing and fulfillment partner, which is one very key part of the equation, but it takes quite a lot more than that to enable a complete experience in each country. Picking Germany as one example, we need German language keyboards, a Type F power cable, in-box paperwork and labeling in German, localization for the Framework website, support documentation, and checkout flow, support for local payment methods, calculation of Euro prices and taxes, accounting support for German income, creation of legally sound Terms of Sale, Privacy, and Warranty policies for Germany, CE certifications, a local Authorized Representative to back up the certifications, determination of HS codes and tariffs, an Importer of Record to be able to deliver duty paid, German-language in-time-zone customer support, reverse logistics and RMA support for returns and repairs, region-specific sourcing of off the shelf memory and storage, trial builds of German laptops prior to production, and back-end ERP infrastructure to tie all of this together. That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a drastically simplified summary.
I thought the whole point of the E.U. was to break down those cross-border paint points. Or is it still a work in progress? Can an E.U. person say if this is going to change?
The vast majority of that list has nothing to do with laws, but with physical requirements (keyboard and power plug), payments (not standardized beyond bank transfers), localization, and logistics.
It just comes down to suppliers, who aren't serving customers outside of select markets for whatever reason.
Sadly, every country insist on doing everything else his own special snowflake way. There would have to be a lot more harmonization for it to be that easy.
27 countries need to coordinate to first agree to grant the EU the power to take over some aspects and then those same 27 countries need to actually do the work, together with the EU, to standardize that aspect. Then the standard needs to be adopted and enforced.
The EU has less power than a confederation, which is a very weak supra-statal organization. So everything is very, very slow.
The EU is gradually able to do more and more, but the time frames are decades long.
I bought & imported a Supernote e-ink tablet from China the other day. The manufacturer offers none of the things mentioned above, heck their support team barely speaks English (but god knows they're trying!). Still everyone on Reddit loves them because they 1) produce a killer product, 2) provide great support when needed (e.g. send you a replacement or fix bugs), and 3) respond to community requests and regularly roll out software updates with fantastic new features.
I can understand not shipping to a "untrustworthy" country like Romania or Poland (lol), but Sweden, Italy, Belgium? Even they register for mail forwarding services in order to buy from Germany (and before, UK).
It's much easier to buy from AliExpress, the CCP can't believe their luck with us drowning ourselves in redundant regulations while producing there because of lack of them.
On that note, Russia makes 2/3 of the world's nuclear power plants and they built this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge in THREE YEARS. We can't manage a stupid river bridge for the same budget in a decade.
Right now you're just forcing people to jump through hoops by not allowing them to directly order from anywhere.
Aside. I've seen the exact same problems with our local Amazon "competitor". As soon as they became a platform marketplace I've started using them less and less because of the same quality/delivery issues.
They're not ordering from amazon.com (US), they're probably ordering from amazon.de with a thin layer of English translations + autotranslations.
I've used .de very often in the past, and when I stopped using Amazon, as said in reply to someone else https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31445473 , quality dropped (among other downsides) when they allowed third party sellers and those flood the product listing pages.
With those specific suppliers (and anything that isn't fulfilled by Amazon), I expect to be possible to have the issues you're referring to. But I wouldn't clump that together with Amazon not being available in some EU countries.
Which is that even if it's legally a single market it's common that stores that deliver something to your door only sell their products in their own native country, or only within their local region.