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.
It just comes down to suppliers, who aren't serving customers outside of select markets for whatever reason.
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.