Absolutely, the EU is a free market. But internally they could be working with a shipping provider that’s only shipping to countries with a certain volume of laptops. The company could also only be shipping to countries where there’s greater demand.
As said in the last comment, there could also be local issues with shipping providers, or authorities.
It’s not just because the EU has regulations in which states that a company ‘could’ ship to every EU member without extra taxation or with certain requirements met by members that should make the process easier that they have to.
It might just not be economical or worth the hassle to ship laptops or products right off the hook. With a little patience, your country will have availability if not for the marketplace yet, for the laptop.
Well, I’ve been waiting for over half a year now. I’m in the market of buying a new laptop and I really need one soon. Since the covid restrictions have been lifted I’ve been traveling around and I work remote and currently own a laptop with 4GB RAM which really limits my work when I’m not at home. I’ve been waiting for that laptop for too long now I am loosing patience (and money).
All they need is to enable to pick the shipping country in the German store and I don’t know where the issue is since I will otherwise buy a random laptop from German Amazon anyway.
I was able to configure a laptop and put in a shipping address, if you’re having issues with ordering you can always contact Framework via their support lines.
All of this infrastructure also makes it easier for us to scale up our product and Marketplace volumes and reach new countries, which we will continue to do over the next year. You can help us prioritize by registering your interest on our country selection page.
It’s now August and since the 3 countries they added in February there haven’t been any updates, despite 2 of those 3 being in the EU. I had to buy a new work laptop recently and would absolutely have gone with a Framework if it at least shipped here, but it didn’t. No other brand has this problem, I don’t get how System76 or Tuxedo can ship me a laptop, but Framework can’t. Are there actually any legal problems where you can ship to some EU countries but not others, or is it just them not wanting to?
I don’t want a localized keyboard. I’m fine with support in English. I get that some people aren’t and those people should indeed wait, but I don’t see why everyone should. And be honest here, do you actually expect to have support in every country? Because that’s a massive endeavour and if it’s necessary to even have the laptop available in that country then it will take multiple years before smaller countries have it.
They won’t open to more EU countries this year: EU Shipping estimate - #114 by Gergely_Molnar
There are no legal issue, I think it is more likely the fact they sell out batches pretty quickly to the current markets they operate in, and they don’t want to open others until they ramp up the manufacturing.
Their lack of clarity or even a basic new markets roadmap is really really annoying tbh.
I do love the product and I do not want to buy a new non modular laptop again but I have been waiting for 1+ year for some visibility on their shipping ETA to more EU countries.
They are still selling out the batches well, so probably they don’t feel the urge to have more customers, until production levels are higher than what they can sell to the current markets easily.
I don’t like this, since it negatively affects me(they still don’t ship to any country which would work for me, so I had to use a forwarding service), but as a business, this makes perfect sense.
What they could improve on is the messaging though.
