Perhaps a bit of perspective is needed here....

First and foremost I will be buying 3 drives as soon as I can.

This thread started out with a concept of a sub $30.00 drive with certain performance characteristics. The design and development process was openly discussed from beginning to near end. A few small price adjustments were explained in great detail during the design process. Your own pricing structure was explained in great detail etc. Even all your own failures were openly explained here in the forum. Then suddenly at the end the price doubles. You have to admit, from a customer point of view this is a bit strange.

At this time you are trying to justify the price increase due to concerns there could be manfacturing problems and no way to absorb them based on tight margins. You didn't think of this in the begining of the design process?

You are also trying to justify the price increase based on your costs to process an order. Frankly, if it takes your employees 30 minutes to process an order, you really need to work on the efficiency of your operation there. You didn't know this in the beginning of the design process?

Is it possible that you recently realized how inefficient your company is run and that quality control is marginal enough that have to increase prices to cover those shortcomings?

I fully understand that selling a $30.00 product is hard to do and make money at. While there are thousands of companies that do it on a regular basis, I certainly couldn't do it either. But in the end, it was you that explained the pricing from the beginning - it was you that justified the price from the beginning. It is you who suddenly realized that you cannot manufacture and sell a product at the price promised months ago. You have been in business long enough to know that manufacturing problems exist and yet you didn't plan for that in your equation for pricing? You didn't consider the internal costs to process an order in your original pricing?

This, coming from the guy who has explained the cost of virtually every penny of this project is a bit strange. So forgive us, the customers, for being a bit puzzled as to why you had to double the prices at the end. Also take a moment to look at things from our perspective and why some of us feel justified in our feelings.

I know in the end the product this will be a high quality product that will deliver on the quoted performance. The down side to this whole thread and project is that it clearly has shown the "not so good side" of Gecko.

Chris - who will buy three drives at the intro price.








Quote Originally Posted by Mariss Freimanis View Post
The 2-week intro price will be $29 for the G250, $39 for the G251 in any quantity. Buy one or buy a bazillion.

Please walk in my shoes for a minute:

1) It costs us just over $15 to process an order. It makes no difference if the order is for 1 drive or a 1,000 drives. This is oftentimes the "handling" in "shipping and handling". We have never charged for handling because the big orders cover that expense for the single-piece orders. That $15 constitutes more than 50% of the gross profit for a $31 drive.

2) If the single piece price is $31, what is the 10, 100 and 1,000 piece price? There is simply no room to make it less. There is no incentive for resellers to buy the drives then. The consequence will be most orders will be small ones, straining the "handling" bottleneck to the breaking point.

Here's the numbers: We have 3 people in the office. It takes on average 30 minutes to process an order from phone / internet to product in a box ready for UPS or FedEx. This means each person can complete only 16 orders per day. The practical maximum is 30 orders a day since there are other office tasks that have to be done.

If all those orders are for 1 drive each, the income for the company is $930 per day. You cannot pay 10 employees, taxes and facility operating costs with that.

Those are the economic realities. I wish it were different. It would be nice if a drive could magically appear in your hand when you wanted it and $31 would appear in our company account as payment. Were that possible, I'd be perfectly happy. Unfortunately there are those irreducible transaction costs standing in the way. We have to sell these drives in large volumes or it simply won't work out.

Mariss