I am considering purchasing FOCBOXs in mass quantities from Enertion to sell in the San Francisco area since @evoheyax seems to have been out of stock for a while now. However, profits are low, and it is quite an investment which means I need at least 10 people that think they would purchase at least one. How many would be interested? This would make shipping in California extremely cheap for FOCBOXs, potentially saving a few $$$.
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You can’t just buy in bulk from Enertion anymore, you need to be a part of the official supplier program
I’m aware - that’s exactly what I would be doing. As I stated though, I calculated the profits and found that despite enertion’s claim that profits are around 350$/month, max profits would be around 230$/month with 10 FOCBOXs. When I asked how they got to that number, I was replied with “Well, you sell it for a bit more and there are always shipping charges ;)”. I don’t intend to inflate shipping price…
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Sorry, I wrongly understood 
But I think the margin are in AUD so 350AUD is roughly around 250USD
I need to get (2) two Focboxes on the comming weeks. How much are we talking here $$ @anorak234 ??
I’m at Taylor & Post by the way.
Even then, 250$ is not much profit. It’s a huge risk.
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@pixelsilva rocket boards (@evoheyax) was selling them for 155$ each + shipping, so I’d probably do the same.
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$310 + shipping… let me think about it
@anorak234 I’m in the air about what to do with the focbox program. Profits are so low ($15 per focbox if you sell at $155) in them that it’s more so eating up capital that could be used on more profitable things I’m working on, like hummies hubs and my hollow core decks.
On top of that, everyone interested refused to pay that price. I couldn’t sell a single focbox at $155, because no one was willing to pay that. I didn’t offer anything special other than the fact I’m here in the US and you would get quick shipping, but the convince was still not enough.
At the end of the day, I’m more focused right now on the hubs and decks, and will likely need to develop my own vesc version at some point to compete. If it’s not original, good luck selling it in a way that will be worth your time.
At the end of the day, all that enertion does is have a factory make them and ship them to me. That’s maybe 20% of the work, while they take 90% of the profits… It’s not really a fair system.
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The program makes absolutley no sense condidering the design hasnt changed and months before they sold them for $99. Its not fair to the customers either for a $35 charge increase per vesc. It just doesnt make sense at all for anyone except enertion who takes in all the profit making it completely unreasonable to sell their vesc considering few people want to buy at $150 each
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I always had sell Vesc over 135USD… what wasn’t making sens where people buying them at low price and sell them back at a price way lower than Enertion…, basicly it is just killing a product, Enertion should have never sold them at that price range, but I think Jason did it so people could do group buy and get fairly great price, but it turn out that some people bought them to resell them instead, which in not bad, but they wheren’t alwayls doing it at a logic price, considering the product in relation of the market.
So… It is still more advance and reliable than other vesc available on the market.
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Same problem will appear in the pre-build market, because of the meepo… It will cause serious problem for new company to appear.
Edit: and it will be harder and harder to find quality product since the price wize the market is just gonna collapse
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I paid around $180 ea. for my Ollin Vescs which I guess are no longer available. I feel the quality of the Focbox and the way it’s packaged makes it a bargain for $155
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This is the problem when you don’t regulate your resellers prices. But jacking the price to almost $140 each for us to pay, to resell at $155, doesn’t make much sense either.
The better option would have been to leave it at $100 per focbox for resellers, and refuse to sell to us again if we don’t sell at a minimum price, say $150. Instead, now we can get blacklisted for selling too cheaply, on top of the fact that we pay crazy high prices for them.
For example, for hummies hubs, we did a bulk order from ABEC for front wheels. We have a contract that says we can’t sell for something like less than 10% (+/- 5% for my bad memory) than ABECs price, so we can’t undercut the market. This doesn’t mean they still make 90% of the profit, and only give us a 10% profit margin if we were to resell them. It’s more like 40% profit.
Mean while, I calculated how much I believe enertion makes every month selling the focbox alone baised on the information I have, and I came up to over 20k a month in profit alone. That’s pretty nice profit for something like this. Mean while, us little guys can at best, make 1k a month if we manage to sell 1 focbox per day at full price, which in the month I tried, was basically impossible. At our current plans, it’s more like $300 per month, if you can sell one every 3 days, which is still hard.
Now that enertion did the big cyber monday/black Friday deal, which is far better than the resellers deal, it will be even harder for us to resell at full retail price, since everyone who was waiting (including customers of mine who were going to buy focboxes from me) jumped on this deal. Why can enertion sell it at full price still? Because they put in more time in advertising and their name is on the product. Idk about you, but I fell better buying a product like this directly from the manufacturer rather than a reseller. I’ve figured I would need to spend 20+ hours a week building content to be able to sell 1 focbox a day. At 1k per month in profit, that’s $12.50 an hour. Minimum wage here in SF is $13.50. With my own product, I can make 100 times that, like enertion is. If I made even $30 per focbox, doubling my profit, this would be worth while for me. But at this time, it’s simply not.
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This is a very fair point. Focbox’s are also open source so really anyone can make their own to compete.
I was considering becoming a reseller in the USA, but it is 100 percent pointless once their is another US person who will sell and ship it at the same price as me. The profit margin is way to slim for me to deal with the 1 hour it would take me to mail it. 15 dollars an hour is not a lot of money. And it is not even consistent money. At least as a jeweler I could get 12 an hour for 40 hours a week. Might be a little bit of hardwork but it was consistent.
And that the point if you’re not interested in putting down the money for coverring production cost (wich is around 20-30K) going the reselling route with a profits of around 10% per units sold, is not that bad.
And as @Namasaki had mentioned 150USD for a good speed controller, is a fair price
Who provides warranty service with the resellers program?
Really don’t want to fight or argue with you, I know we see things differently, so not trying to poke the bear or anything. But hummie has deals with paris and abec, and both give them to him with a 40% or more profit margin left.
I think 20-30k is a bit extreme for production costs. Maybe if you want to start out with 500 units, yes. But 5-10k investment on the start up should be enough to get a product like this going. Hummie built his hub motors on far less than 30k investment, it was more like 10k.
Have you tried reselling focbox’s, with out the title of “DRV Wizard”? lol. They don’t sell them selves. Even now, I calculated that just with shipping time and time advertising, even if I had sold the 10 I sold at full price, it would have made only $8 per hour. I settled for $4 to get them out the door.
Unless you invest a serious amount of time into reselling them (so you can sell 100+ per month), you won’t make enough to make it worth it. Small time 10 - 30 per month focbox resellers like me are not going to see enough profit to make all of the work creating content and advertising worth it. I can go get a job doing software development and make $80 per hour, so why waste my time with peanuts?
Any one who buys into this program with the hopes of making their own products, are losing capital that could be spent on something where you can actually make a fair salary. I would be content If I could get my company to place where I could make $40 per hour.
I’m assuming enertion makes about 20k per month on the focbox, probably 10k on the nano-x and 20k on the raptor 2’s. That’s 50k per month in profit. Take out 20% to taxes, and your at 40k. He has a few employees. Lets say he pays them 4k per month, x 6 employees I believe. That leaves 16k per month for himself. Now yes, this math is all on what ifs. But I know my focbox estimate is not too far off. This would mean Jasons salary is $100 per hour.
Surely he could pass some of that onto his resellers. Making any product enertion sells is not that hard, just takes time, money, and connecting with the right people. The hardest work is on the selling aspect. If I could get people to do all of my selling and only give them 10% profit, I think EVERY company in the world would do that and no one would sell their own products.
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Couldn’t agree more, profit is one thing unreasonable pricing is another. $150 for a good componenet is fine by me however considering they sold them for 99 bucks a few months ago sort of eats at me and makes me want to find a new vesc
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It’s also fine by me. But when you consider the v4.12 being sold around $100, more people in this community turn to those than the focbox. Then look at universities, and legit researchers/hobbyists who use them for more than electric skateboards. I know if I were them, I’d be buying from the manufacturer themselves and not a third party. For resellers, it’s tough if your not already known for your VESC knowledge.
I think taking the vesc 6.4 to production will be the cheapest solution, maybe allowing us to break the sub $100 barrier. I will be do some research, since I’m just waiting for my sample hollow core decks and motor parts at this point.
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