Topic: Better pre-order pricing scheme (Read 670 times)

Well they don't absolutely have to keep it top secret but just sell it when its in stock and ready to ship in 24hours.

I would also request that in such a case limit the volume per order per shipping / billing address for the first round of stock at least so that Jabbadahut miners don't hog all the hardware and screw the hobbyists.

Or they just shut their mouth until they have a product ready to sell. Then announce it.

Thats not quite true...

They pay a heftier price for the privledge of having the machine earlier and that offsets their profits.

Paying 16k USD in August to get it in October is almost the same as paying 6k USD in October to get it in December.

One problem with pre-orders, is that the customers that order first, get their devices several days or weeks earlier than others, thus extract significantly more value from them.

Option 1

I believe that pre-orders should be priced on a sliding scale in batches based on estimated shipping day.  For example, if the company estimates that they can ship 200 orders per day, then the pricing would be broken down into blocks of 200 units.  The first batch would be full price, then each following batch would be reduced in price based on the estimated BTC mined per day.  For example, batch 2 would be $100 cheaper than batch 1, and batch 3 would be $100 cheaper than batch 2, etc.

For example, with the recent KnC orders, all customers paid $7000 for a Jupiter, but some got them on Oct 5th while others still haven't been shipped.  In that time frame, there have been 2 difficulty resets which means that the early miners could have made at least 6-10 BTC more than later orders.

Option 2

Customers should pay a fee to get a place in line, such as 10 BTC.  When it gets close to shipping time, customers would pay the remaining balance based on the date of their device shipping.  The later it ships, the lower the price.  The final price would be determined by the difficulty and expected difficulty increases at the time of shipping rather than at the time of setting up the pre-order.

The advantage here is that the pricing would better reflect the worth of the device when it ships since it is very difficult to estimate hashing rates 3 months out.