Originally Posted by
Mariss Freimanis
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