Librem 5 accessories and shipping cost

Hello all,

I am very honored to have participated in this great step for the Linux and free software community.
A big thanks to all the Pursim people for this hard journey.

I just would like to understand and point out something that does not look right to me:
within the email this specify “place a separate order for all the accessories you would like shipped
with your Librem 5 phone. You can just reply to this email and share
your accessory order number and we will make sure your accessories are
shipped along with your Librem 5.”

I understand that all the accessories that one wants to order, have to be ordered separaty (fine!), and will be shipped with the phone (great!). BUT once one place a new order to accessories, there is shipping cost which is automatically included! In my case (living in France) >$60.

To me this is odd and not honest. I’m not a native speaker, so may be I don’t get the things right. To me it’s looks like Purism found a good way to make pay for the shippment, which was included for free at the beginning :-/

Could you please make this point clear to everyone?

Thanks a lot

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I believe its because you can go ahead and order the accessories now if you want (say, to use them for other devices), which will have a shipping cost, and that cost gets calculated when your order like it does on any other site. This “bundling with the phone that comes later” thing is an unusual and temporary circumstance. Once the phone is actually shipping to customers when they order (after all this preorder business gets taken care of) then the shipping costs will make sense.

Regardless, you bring up a valid point, and if I were you I would email purism and ask them about it. I think its likely an oversight, but I don’t work for them.

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Someone else raised this somewhere (maybe in the Matrix chatrooms). If you email support@puri.sm with your phone order number and accessory order number, they will combine them and refund the duplicate shipping charge.

Yes, thank you for your answers.

It is clear that a new order works as a new order by itself and therefore includes the cost for delivery.
It’s also clear that the vast majority of people who will receive their phone will add some accessories, at least the protection film, I guess.
The fact that they proposed to combine the 2 orders is a very good thing, and I can’t believe that this issue of delivery is not obvious to the one who decided to organize things this way, specialy that they said that they wait to get the accessories ready before sending the mail.

I’m ready to buy the SD card from purism and other accessories that you could find cheaper elsewhere just to help them, however, I don’t think it’s cool to have to pay for the delivery, when it’s already included for the phone (and the accessories can fit in the phone box, right?).

I already asked for explanations in reply to the email before writing here.
I guess it will be best for purism to clarify this here for everyone.

Here is the answer from support:

about the shipping costs for accessories;
This is an error that we are working on fixing. If you already ordered then send me the order number and we will refund you.

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What you wrote definitely makes sense. However there are a range of more complicated circumstances that an ordering system may have to deal with

e.g. user places two separate orders - should they be combined in order to minimise shipping cost? will that minimise shipping cost? should the user get to choose? can they be combined if they have incompatible attributes?
e.g. user places one order but not everything is available immediately - should the order be split even though that will likely increase shipping cost? should the user get to choose?

The first scenario could arise even once the whole preorder business is taken care of i.e. user orders phone, user forgets to order accessories, user then immediately orders accessories. In an ideal world, a customer wouldn’t have to email Purism and rely on manual actions in order to get the orders combined, if that’s what the customer wants.

I’ve seen lots of online ordering systems and they exhibit a range of behaviors.

True, but I wouldn’t think it unreasonable of a company to not “think for me” in that regard. As a disclaimer, I also don’t know how much work it would be for the ordering system to keep track of order times versus shipment times and locations, maybe it isn’t a big deal after all. This would also apply to your second scenario. I think ideally the user should get to choose whether or not to split their order if something(s) aren’t available, but maybe that isn’t feasible. For my part, in that scenario I think it reasonable to ship what’s available, charge for shipping, then later ship the other items and charge to ship them as well. Two shipments, two shipping costs seems fair to me. To argue one way or another further would require knowing whether the company selling the unavailable items is to be blamed for their unavailability, I think.

A triple negative? OK, I think I understand. :slight_smile:

Let’s put it this way (for the multiple order situation), there are at least two ways of keeping the user in control

a) when the second order is placed (ready to submit), the user gets the choice of adding to an existing order or making it a separate order (if there is an existing order)

b) after the second order is placed, the user can see the two orders and can click something to request the two orders be combined

A mass of business rules could impact upon whether either or both of these is permitted for the two specific orders.

It shouldn’t really matter, per se, whether the order is a preorder. The preorder is still just an existing order sitting in the system in a state where it hasn’t been fulfilled.

Anyway, at this stage I just want my L5 - and I’m happy for Purism to consider the finer points of ordering systems after all preorders are satisfied. :wink:

i love this :sweat_smile:

I’d decided I’d rather be proud of it than ashamed of it.

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