Packaging

[rascal]

Right now we have leased and owed licence.

Wouldn't it be great if users who bought the owed licence get a package of the software with printed manual in box instead of downloading it via the site?

True that the file size does not warrant such a package but at least we can sleep beside the box and dream of it....:D

[bigmattyh]

Do you know what it costs to set that up? Printing of the manual... Box printing and creating... Printing vB on CD... Packing the boxes... Hiring staff to do all this....

Do you want vB to cost $500 a pop?

[Floris]

I once read a comment from vB team/dev member that they are not planning on having vBulletin - site in a box - or alike.

This will take higher costs which need to be calculated through the end-user. I also think that burning 500kByte to a CD is overkill. It is small & easy to download (Even through E-mail) and the manual is now in a .pdf

Since files are changing (typo's, bugs, whatever) almost every month or so, being an import script, manual, demo, vblite, gold version, new release, upgrade script, whatever, it will be too intensive to stay up2date and deliver within minutes to the purchase.

[rascal]

Just a suggestion though. :(

Got a point there whereby the cost will be borne by end-users like us. :)

[Floris]

Originally posted by rascal
Just a suggestion though. :(

Got a point there whereby the cost will be borne by end-users like us. :)

There is nothing wrong with sharing your thoughts :) Otherwise this whole idea of people having a forum wouldn't be relevant :)

[rascal]

ditto!:D

But mayb as a made-to-order for pple who are interested if that possible.

[tubedogg]

As bigmattyh said, the cost would be extremely prohibitive. Even if we were to eschew the box and just provide a CD, we have to do one of two things:

1) Burn on-demand, that is have one of us burn a copy everytime someone ordered one. This presents problems in that how do we make this look professional? Sure we could use a label but that doesn't look very professional. We could also have the CDs pre-"printed" for lack of a better word, with the stuff directly put on the top of the CD, but that would be mucho expensive and if we put the version number on that, it would create excess (useless) stock when a new version is released.

2) Profesionally mastered & burned. This would cost a ton and we would end up with stock left over I'm sure, as there are minimum runs that must be done.

Either way I'm pretty sure the cost would be quite prohibitive, even to do it on-demand.

[Chen]

Originally posted by xiphoid
I once read a comment from vB team/dev member that they are not planning on having vBulletin - site in a box - or alike.
Just as a sidenote, when we said vBulletin won't be a "site out of the box" it means vB won't be a complete site you can just install and voila. It's just an expression. :)

[IDN]

cds are bad, i say put em on floopy and have a little stamp thing with the version number that you can switch to a diff number easily...

[Scott MacVicar]

Yeah but it means they'd need to hire someone to deal with orders, ie creating the disks and then putting them in envelopes then the trip to the post office, the post office in the UK is terrible lol.

[Chen]

Originally posted by PPN
Yeah but it means they'd need to hire someone to deal with orders, ie creating the disks and then putting them in envelopes then the trip to the post office, the post office in the UK is terrible lol.
I thought that's why we hired those Thai kids? ;)

[Scott MacVicar]

no that wasn't for the packaging that is to right the vBulletin 3.0 manual, 100 kids working at 100 type writters for a week should produce it ;)

[chrispadfield]

This sort of thing could probably be done for around $50 per order but I doubt many people are going to want to pay for this. I have been looking into it a bit for my software and it is just not really worth it. Especially when the software needs to be updated every couple of months with new features etc and you would have to send out more cds...

[Wayne Luke]

Originally posted by PPN
Yeah but it means they'd need to hire someone to deal with orders, ie creating the disks and then putting them in envelopes then the trip to the post office, the post office in the UK is terrible lol.

You actually have to go into the post office to make deliveries? How barbaric. ;).

We just call them up here and they come pick up the deliveries every evening.

[chrispadfield]

which is why the Post Office is about to go bust ... (well, one of the many reasons :) )

[Scott MacVicar]

Its run by some company called Consignia and they are useless, if you put a fragile sticker on a package they presume it means kick the package up and down the sorting room.
The queues are sooo evil, its like 30 people long all wanting to send packages then they decide to overcharge you for everything.