I received invitation to order R2. With a warning that I must order in 4 days otherwise my slot in the queue will be lost. As the S/W is in progress still and the price is not small I dropped everything to study the available reviews and S/W roadmap. Finally I decided to order. Only to discover that Unfolded Circle decided that (contrary to sales terms on their page) they will only sell to selected European Union countries, which is unusual practice on the common EU market. Unfortunately my country (Poland) is excluded, so I can’t order
Kind of disappointment. I can’t understand why shipping to Poland should be harder than shipping to France or Finland, not to mention New Zealand
Product availability
We accept orders on our website from the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
I contacted Unfolded Circle separately and they confirmed that they are not interested in shipping to Poland, and they removed Poland from their Terms and Conditions.
Currently they ship only to selected EU countries plus some countries worldwide:
Product availability
We accept orders on our website from the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States. This list is subject to change without prior notice.
There is a stamen from Marton on Discord about this:
Even thought it’s EU, every country sets their own rules for selling products, recycling, etc. As a small company I think it’s unreasonable to expect that we can follow 27 different countries and their regulations, where some of them even require a local representative. You can imagine how quickly this becomes unmanageable.
We would like to sell to everyone, everywhere, but in the current world, for a startup, it’s impossible.
As a workaround you could try to use a package forwarding service from a country in the EU where UC ships to.
After some consideration, given the fact the the R2 is still in early software development stage, I will rather wait with my Harmony Elite (used one, bought at bargain price, 25% of the cost of the R2, I even bought 2 sets to have a spare - both work fine, even received S/W update) until Unfolded Circle product and logistics will mature enough to serve the customers in my country. If there are valid reasons (regulatory? certification? radio-magnetic interference?) for Unfolded Circle to not sell to all the EU countries, I will rather not go around them.
It is generally surprising to me that each EU country sets it own rules for introducing the products to the local market, I was under the impression that the EU market is much more unified.
I’m sorry you’re affected by this. But this is actually quite common, there’s been many times I have not been able to get items from abroad due “Not selling to Finland due ”
I think the problem here was that UC first announced that they selling to some countries that they later just removed from the list without any further notice. Only when some people asked the team about this change Marton explained the reason.
They removed Poland from the list on their Terms of Sales in the response to my ordering attempt. Instead of sticking to the conditions they set, they just changed their own rules on the fly.
I know that this is not perfect solution, but there’s a service called MailboxDE: https://www.mailboxde.com (or https://www.mailboxde.pl directly for Polish version).
They provide individual shipping address and send a notification when a package for that address arrives. Of course it’s not free. The charge depends on the weight of the package and the courier selected for sending the package to you.
I’ve used this service once for ordering some home automation stuff, because the store selling that stuff stopped shipping to Poland (they’ve used to ship to Poland - that’s how I’ve bought their system in the first place). I’ve received the package without any problems.
Thank you for this hint.
But “Unfolded Circle” announced that there are some regulatory reasons which required them to no longer ship to Poland after Kickstarter campaign, so I will rather not go around them:
In fact we have registered in Poland for all the Kickstarter rewards, but due to the high costs, low number of orders and stringent regulatory requirements we decided to no longer keep the registration.
Even thought it’s EU, every country sets their own rules for selling products, recycling, etc.
I don’t know what registration they have in mind, I was under impression that product allowed in one EU country is automatically allowed on the entire EU market - apparently I was wrong. I can only guess that the requirements might be related to recycling, handling batteries or radio-magnetic interference, but I have no real knowledge here.
From your case it looks like UC is not the only electronics/home automation company facing this issue.
It might be related to this (BDO in Poland, similar to LUCID in Germany):
Looks like common EU market is a big fiction We probably need more EU integration to successfully compete with US, India, China with their big markets/populations.
