I'm not paying that when buying a $9 board.
Considering the volume, shipping by plane from China to Europe to keep minimal stock and using standard mail would be quite effective.
I'm surprised shipping is an issue.
Mind telling me what shipping method?
Second, is there some kind of website you have to determine the cheapest shipping that day?
Thanks much!
And there is, sorta. While our shipping goes through EasyPost, we rarely interact directly with it. Instead our shop uses a web app called Printavo to manage orders. After feeding it the package details it interfaces with EasyPost (very helpfully autofilling the customer's details from the invoice) and displays all available shipping options from USPS, UPS, and FedEx along with prices for all of them. Sometimes the cheapest shipping varies box by box, but in my experience it's always either USPS Priority Mail or (more often) FedEx Ground. And never, ever anything UPS.
Kinda confusingly, I've never seen any of that info on EasyPost itself, just Printavo's wrapper around it.
Funny story, USPS lost one of my packages (containing a pretty rare device). I filled in the "lost property form" and I supplied lots of pictures, the serial number etc(from the ebay auction). 2 years later it arrives unexpectedly. :-D
So, the morale of this story is: USPS lost package forms are a real thing and there is actually a chance they'll find it!
Still, 6 months later they haven't figured it out. From a private conversation with one person "in the know" they claimed its difficult because there are various tax systems in the EU (so what, there are only 27 countries, figure one a month, also it is way more unified now that few years ago when it somehow worked fine for them), that they even have problems shipping to their EU store, that they ship from HongKong and Singapore, despite most of their boards being made in China and that makes it difficult, that their owner "is not China based so they can't use Aliexpress (they could use an intermediary, even with a 20% cut it would still be twice cheaper to ship like this)", that some people in Czech Republic would order cheap boards, then when they were asked to pay few bucks for the lack of EU VAT handling by the seller, declined and Pine had to foot the bill(we're literally talking about $5 bucks), and so and so on.
Eventually I decided I'm 50% convinced they do it on purpose to "help" their EU store, and the other 50% is they simply don't care enough. They just cover the biggest markets and population centers, like shipping to Germany in EU was still available for 12EUR last time I checked. So, no, I'm not buying their risc V board. Id rather get Sipeed's board that I can pay $11 for, but get it shipped for few bucks from China. The whole design is open too.
The EU store has considerably more expensive stock, I assume they have to make sone product guarantees to comply with stricter laws. A Pinecil I bought was almost two times as expensive, though it came without additional shipping costs, from Poland I think.