Being a drop shipper is going to kill future sales from me.
As it stood now people who could buy and pay for large amounts were rewarded with a lower cost as it should be. Now your going to turn it into a cut throat deal on ebay where some kid is going to be happy making 29 cents per unit.
It would be like ASICMINER telling people if they want they will drop ship at the same cost as the resellers get and killing any reseller markup you might get.
Honestly, if Canary wants to sell on eBay he should sell on eBay and undercut the other resellers there like he does here (pure capitalism).
The margins are slim enough on eBay and Amazon now for anyone selling and hoping to recoup profit before the next BE price drop. As-is, it seems like most folks on there about start selling their inventory when the next price drop rolls around, so it is only a matter of suckers buying them at the rate they are buying them before more sellers pop up with lower prices. Plus this muddies things - what if there needs to be a return, what if a unit is DOA, etc.? That's a lot of shipping around to involve a third party in one of those transactions, mailing fees alone for such an error would likely eat up profits for people buying at current prices.
Canary isn't stupid. To kill the retail market would be equivalent to committing suicide. The usb miner sales will die soon enough. Yoou anger the people who buy large amounts they will remember when the erupter sales are EOL. As it stands now he has a healhy relationship with his bulk buyers. I don't see him ruining that for a short term item suchs as the erupter.
I know he isn't stupid, he understands this business better than most.
He's just trying to wiggle into every last facet of sales. It's already obvious he has a majority of sales on the forums, but this ^^^^ is only going to make eBay and Amazon a bigger mess of sellers than it is currently and there are those hanging issues of returns, DOA, etc., that make it even messier.
Would have made a lot more sense to do this when they were 1.05/.99 each, USBs are only going to realistically sell for so much longer, let the folks already liquidating do so with the inventory they likely already purchased from Canary or SSB. In other words,
this offer is basically going to undercut anyone who previously purchased and is reselling. We've got enough 'screw the current customers' going on in BTC hardware land as of late (*cough* Avalon, BFL *cough*).