To all my non-Slovak speaking readers: Why selling through local e-shops matters

 I was browsing Lemmy in the morning as I usually do. And I stumbled upon a post called "To all EU/Europe Open Source/Linux Enthusiasts", which is basically a philosophical post about someone proposing a plan to push Linux phones to the mainstream. But I noticed several factual errors, which is fine (please do your own research before you post something), but I also noticed one single piece of information that's missing: allowing local e-shops, like the green alien one, to resell their Linux device on their site.

Author's note: Some parts of this article are specific to Slovakia, but I'll try my best to provide the context needed.

Why is this important?

  First we need to understand the importance of "local" e-shops (Alza is Czech, but we take it here as local because of historic reasons).

Local e-stores have the infrastructure, warehouses and logistics, plus they are on the market long enough to know it. So what about selling it there? Companies like Lenovo (which has its EU headquarters in Bratislava by the way), Asus, Apple and Google already sell their products through them. So why doesn't companies like Framework, Jolla and Fairphone sell on them? Because they're greedy and they think short-term or their CEOs don't know any better.

I know that because I have the knowledge of running a company from a course called Junior Achievement Slovakia, which is basically a course on how to become a young capitalism shill and learn how it actually works, which we have at our school along with a certified student company whose ROI (return on investment) is none or negative. Plus one of my parents runs a law firm with his friend (you can look him up on LinkedIn) and sometimes shares his knowledge with me when we're together.

What these companies get/do wrong?

They think short-term and they don't think about expanding outside their sites. If they thought long-term, we would see them on Alza, MediaMarkt (Alza but for Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and others. As I mentioned before, expansion matters. I learned that in school and also while playing Factorio. 

They're run by engineers that have background in engineering and don't have this knowledge or they just did poorly their due diligence by not taking local e-shops into account. Ask Elon Musk how it was to run the entire Twitter as a company. He had to switch positions from CEO to CTO because of being tired to run both the part that does the site and infrastructure itself and also the part responsible for accounting, marketing, HR and other boring departments.

They also forget that these local e-shops have a large user base, which they can turn into customers. Big Tech companies know that, so what about copying this strategy and applying it on themselves.

But they take cuts from our revenue!

Steam also takes a 30% cut, which can be handed down to as low or as high you want, depending on your social skills and effort you're willing to put the effort into the negotiations. This is why every big publisher sells on there.

The same can be applied onto local resellers and e-shops. They also take a cut to sustain themselves and to pay rent, taxes, water, sewage, electricity bills and wages plus employees' retirement to goverment-run Sociálna poisťovňa and insurance to one of three big insurance companies we have here (Všeobecná zdravotná poisťovňa (government-run insurance company), Dôvera (insurance company run by a certain financial group) and Union) in which the given employee is enrolled in.

If you can make a good product that you send out to influencers all around the world but you can't provide the shopping comfort, then something's wrong with your strategy. Always remember that if the shop takes for example 30%, then you can always recoup the costs by selling more devices at the same price.

What can these manufacturers do about it?

They need to have a dropdown at checkout from where you can select your country and where after the selection can user select if they want the product to be delivered to their local parcel locker, affiliate brick-and-mortar stores or by a delivery man to their house, depending on what the delivery company has in the given country.

I meant this, but with country-specific options

If they don't want to deal with that, then partner up with local e-shops or carriers if they sell phones or tablets. They can handle marketing, logistics and more for them, depending on contract they have with the e-shop or carrier. Slovak carriers don't do carrier locking, since the last thing any sane company wants to do is be fined (this practice is forbidden in the EU).

Conclusion

If this article makes sense to you, then tell companies that sell Linux/privacy devices to seriously rethink their strategy. If your favorite influencer shills the device but you can't get it from you local e-shop, then don't buy it.

If you liked this article, then leave a star and repost on LinkedIn, star and boost on Mastodon (or quote me there with your opinion on this) and upvote or downvote and crosspost to relevant communities on Lemmy. Leave your thoughts in comments under this article or under announcing posts on Mastodon, LinkedIn or on Lemmy.