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[on:]

I am a teacher in Florida USA and I would love to teach with with this board and micro, but the cost is more then I can do as we have little to no cash for this and what I do have ( basic stamp ) i have payed for it myself. If anyone could help that would be very nice.

[Reply #1 on:]

William, I think you would find lowest available (AFAIK) prices on Arduino boards and starter sets at my site: http://yourduino.com.

Please email me directly and I can try to help with lower costs for Educational institution.

Regards, Terry King
On The Red Sea
terry@yourduino.com

[Reply #2 on:]

Terry,

I was just looking at your site and I am intrigued. You do seem to have the best prices on the market for Arduino related stuff. Your prices seem too good though. How can you sell for such low prices?

I ask, because I too teach with Arduino and I'm always looking for ways to get things for lower prices. And while I don't want to offend you, when things on the internet seem too good to be true they usually are. It would make it much easier to order from you if I had some idea how you could sell stuff for in some cases less than half what most other companies charge.

Thanks,
Steve Dickie
Divine Child High School
electronics.flosscience.com

[Reply #3 on:]

Wow. Good question!

Basically, I was looking for good prices like you, and it evolved into this...

The enabler was that I had lived in Shenzhen China where all this stuff really comes from, and I have a good friend, Jun Peng who is there now.  He was at a point where he wanted to try a different job and we started up this company that you see..  I did the Web / Store stuff... Take a look at http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=page_view&p=about_us for the story...

I am an old scrounger / hacker guy and when I saw what prices we could get from the factory or first-level middleman it seemed too good to pass up.  I've never been a Business guy but I have tried to get stuff for schools and young people for years (I got 500+ older IBM computers out of IBM and into schools, years ago..).

Also we have put the profit pretty low. Maybe that was a mistake.  I hate the idea of increasing that just to look as respectable as Sparkfun or Adafruit..

Also we decided not to make money on shipping, like so many "cheap" Ebay sellers.  We put effort into negotiating good shippings costs. And Shenzhen China is the cheapest place to ship from to anywhere in the world...

I'd REALLY appreciate feedback from anyone on how to think about this.    We don't have much business yet, and I'd sure like to break even some time  

I'm hoping the Starter Sets we have put together will be good for schools at a good price.   We are very open to suggestions on those and other products.  Right now we can't afford to stock too much, but most things are a short walk from Peng's shared office space.  So the "Just In Time" suppliers we read about are real...

Let me know about what your school is doing and looking for. Any suggestions of ways we can connect with more schools / teachers in USA would be appreciated!

[Reply #4 on:]

@Terry,
Do you also ship to the Netherlands?

[Reply #5 on:]

Hi,

Yes, Europe and Nederlands is prime shipping target for China.  Nederlands is in the cheapest of 3 Euro zones for us.

Do a trial order with some items and go as far as putting a shipping address in, and one more 'Continue' : (Not committing to order) You will see a Shipping "Pull-down" where you should see 3 choices:

DHL_3-6Days  (Most expensive)
EU_Express  (Good for some medium weights.. Supposedly 4-5 days but I have no proof yet. Goes 1-day air freight to Europe then in local country Postal Service).
HongKongAir_Registered_7-14Days   (Cheapest by far: Supposedly 7-10 days to Europe.. no specific experience yet. )

ALL of these are trackable and tracking number will be supplied. 

It was quite an experience getting all this shipping set up, and it would have been impossible without Peng on the ground in Shenzhen.  I see why lots of Ebay sellers ship HongKongPost only...

We're asking every new customer to email us exact delivery day so we can get better data.

Thanks for considering us...