This is the danger with generating hype… and yes, some expected too much. If we think about it, what company puts their hotly anticipated product on sale as soon as they get them? Yes, I know, I wanted a truck load of flashy dimmers too, who wouldn’t, but… Inovelli is a business first.
Let’s move on.
@flipontheradio Yes, I was a buyer. I bought 18 Red switches during the Canada make-up sale (see my post in that topic). Also, I was the one that posted a topic for everyone using OpenHab to learn how to get the Scenes and Notifications for the Red Switches to work in OpenHab.
Again, unless you were really paying attention to all the screw ups that occurred in Canada, stay out of it as the Americans were never impacted by any of those prior screw ups.
Canada Screw up #1.
The initial Black and Red switch launch sale in US and Canada was only screwed up for Canada only (blame amazon.ca) and Eric had responded in that thread that a separate makeup sale for Canada would come later. Unlike the US sale where buyers could see the price of both the Black and Red switches and make an informed decision how many of each to buy, only the price for the Black switch was disclosed during the initial Black and Red sale (because the Red switches were not appearing on amazon.ca for some unknown reason and took weeks to resolve). Remember, only USD pricing appears on this site and amazon.com, and CAD pricing only appears on amazon.ca, so us Canadian’s do not know the actual CAD price. We Canadians are used to seeing hugely inflated Cdn prices relative to USD prices, and we regularly have to decide if it is worth the extra hassle to import from the US into Canada vs buying directly in Canada at the inflated prices. Without the CAD sale price, we couldn’t make an informed decision during what turned out to be the initial Black only (no Red pricing) only sale.
I was all ready to buy both Blacks and Reds at the time of the initial sale, but based on Eric’s indication that they would repeat the sale again in Canada once they sorted out amazon.ca, I was disappointed (due to misunderstanding of Eric’s response) that the Blacks were not going to be on sale once we learned the price of the Reds. As I indicated in that thread, I ended buying all Red switches instead of a combination of Reds and Blacks. In hindsight, I should have bought a dozen of Blacks without knowing the price of the Reds. Instead, I spent $70 more for a dozen Reds (on top of the 6 Reds I definitely wanted for the notifications) and will now have Reds next to each other in many dual/triple gang box locations.
Canada Screw up #2
As Eric indicated, this site was also supposed to have been opened up for Canada so we can buy directly from Inovelli and could bypass amazon.ca, and not have to worry about importation costs, but this site is still not able to sell to Canada for anything (no Black/Red Switches, no Black/Red Dimmers, nothing).
Canada Screw up #3
This dimmer/bulb bundle that was supposed to be for Canada also was pulled and can’t even be offered to Canada since the bulbs were never certified for Canada. Now, we are told they will be a different make up sale for Canada…whatever that will be.
Based on the track record of Eric’s past communications, and my misinterpretations, I have doubts over what Eric has said, and I will expect some Canadians will get double-dinged on Canadian taxes and importation fees, with Inovelli charging and collecting taxes on their site and then the courier company and/or Canada government will impose extra importation charges because Inovelli didn’t implement the selling directly to Canadians (outside of amazon.ca) properly. Again, Canadian are used to this and carefully base their decision to buy through US sellers, but some will decide based on written representations made by Eric and other employees on this site. As for me recommending on RFD (a major Canadian deals site), I will speak to the merits of the Red switches, but as for whether the regular non-sale price is a hot deal or not…as another indicated, they have really lost any momentum they could have had up here in Canada with the multiple screw ups. The RFD effect quickly cleared out all their Gen 1 products when they discontinued those and dropped the prices. There was an RFD thread for the initial Black and Red sale, which had some hype, but it quickly died down due to that screw up, and nobody really showed interest when the thread mentioning the Reds sale was finally live. Again, no threads on RFD yet hyping the new dimmer launch because, again, another Canada screw-up.
I for one am excited! 8 ordered today. I don’t really need the bulbs, but I will gladly find a home for them. Thanks Inovelli team! I can’t wait to setup additional scenes.
Thanks for the support!
Amazon Canada collects tax so there would never be brokerage costs.
Honestly, I am much more likely to buy from Amazon Canada vs a US business due to the potential for UPS/FedEx/DHL involvement. I believe we’ve all experienced the situation where a company says they can ship USPS but then the item is shipped UPS/FedEx/DHL anyway because it’s what they normally use.
To be clear, the Canadian government doesn’t impose importation charges; charges like those are created by UPS/FedEx/DHL. Inovelli advised that they would ship via USPS, so assuming they did, even if taxes weren’t collected, Canada Post would only charge sales tax plus the $9.95 handling fee.
I think we all agree things could have gone better but sometimes this is par for the course, with many events simply not under Inovelli’s control. I truly feel they want to do their best and have faith they will.
…Donovan
Im not expecting this at all, I feel the team at Inovelli are doing a great job communicating transparently, and have already proven they know how to sell and ship cross border. I received my pre-order of red dimmer witches yesterday, shipped via USPS, with $0 due at delivery. I cant see how any other order would be any different.
I actually think it is awesome that the Inovelli team offered this Black Friday deal. It is a great deal, especially for those that could use the bulbs. Thanks, Inovelli.
Personally, though, I was thinking (wishfully perhaps?) that the deal on the dimmers would be similar to the Amazon flash sale on the newly released red series on/off switches. That was an awesome deal. I bought several switches on that one.
But, again, thank you Inovelli for being such an awesome company. You have my undying loyalty. 
Yes, to anyone concerned – I can promise that we understand courier fees and if shipping from our HQ in Michigan, we will never ship any courier other than USPS for Canadian customers.
@driedger I saw the preorder back in the spring but didn’t participate and didn’t notice if it was through their online store or was through some other means. Did they actually collect the tax from you through their online store for the preorder? The reason their store isn’t accepting Cdn orders right now is because it isn’t able to charge and collect the correct tax for Canada, so you are saying it was working back then for preorders only and not working any more?
How do you quote on here?
@cba123 Thanks for your question. The preorder earlier in the year was through our website. Our e-store was not set up to collect CDN sales tax at that time; however, we are still on the hook for anything we should have collected but didn’t. While we are setup to collect CDN sales tax now through our store, we are working to ensure our Canadian customers aren’t double-charged taxes by us collecting them and the USPS/Canada Post collection process as part of us shipping from the US to Canada. We are working to resolve this so we can open up our store again to our friends north of the border. Appreciate everyone’s patience. 
I may be wrong, but at least with other places I’ve ordered, only companies selling FROM Canada would collect tax.
And then sometimes the border will charge it, sometimes they won’t.
Nice deal! I was planning on just grabbing a couple extra of the new dimmers (I already have two from the preorders), but might as well upgrade some extra dumb and existing smart switches to get notifications everywhere!
I have watching for this sale to be opened hoping to pick up dimmers for the new house which will have no use for light bulbs. Being Canadian, couldn’t do the pre-sale so I hoped this was it. No big deal, I’ll wait for Inovelli to come through with another great deal for us Canadians like they did with the switches.
cba123 - Just to clear this up. I bought 10 black and 5 red switches on sale at the same time when Eric first posted about the sale before the reds disappeared off Amazon.ca. So, the switches were on Amazon.ca and they were for sale exactly as Eric posted in the sale thread. I just happened by chance to look here and see the sale right after it was posted. I went right to Amazon and bought $600 of switches without even knowing where they would be used because I wanted Inovelli in the new house.
A US company that properly sells to Canada WILL collect the taxes and WILL broker the item through the border via a courier so there are no extra fees when it arrives. It sounds like that is what Inovelli is trying to do, get setup to do it properly like it should be done.
@PJF That’s the right way to do it, but they weren’t ready, so Eric should not have told Canadians that we would be included in this BF deal and should have arranged for a Cdn BF deal via amazon.ca instead.
From a transparency perspective, they never corrected themselves before the sale and when the sale started, there was no upfront “Sorry Canada, our site still isn’t ready for you and sorry the bulbs aren’t certified for Canada either, so we will do a different BF sale for Canada in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned.” Instead, Canadians started asking what is going on, and then we slowly got some fragmented responses. @Eric_Inovelli looking to you…
So far, I have been impressed with the Red switch, although I only have 1 out of 18 hooked up. Hopefully, I don’t encounter the various 3 way switch issues others are having when I get time to wire my 3 way switches up. So, it seems like the product is delivering on its promises from a R&D perspective, so, they are an innovator and only have a problem on their sales (e-commerce) and marketing side (offering a promotion to Cda that was not possible)
I think the bigger issue is not misleading information, but that the Inovelli crew are trying to be super transparent…which also has drawbacks. There’s a reason that often companies withhold information (and people complain about them being opaque), especially in the tech industry. Things can change quickly, problems arise, etc. If you wait to communicate, you can be more accurate, but then it means people have no idea what, if anything, is happening.
In this case, we get to see every little piece of info, every pivot, etc. There’s sometimes a bit of lack of information when things change, but I’m guessing part of that is because things happen quickly and they’re busy people. I imagine (hope) over time things will balance out a bit. I’m sure they’ll learn to under-promise and over-deliver a bit more.
Alright everyone, dad just came home from his long week of writing manuals and it seems and I’m getting reports from the babysitter (@anon14959390) that things kind of got out of hand here.
@cba123 – I’m going to have to ask for your allowance back and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to ground you for a couple days with no Netflix and give you a Snickers or something – dang… I don’t think I’ve ever met an angry Canadian before, so I’m not sure what to do here – you open for a hug over the internet?
Anyway, I had my rebuttal all typed up and ready to go, guns blazing, but decided against it as we’d just just go tit for tat and it would just not be productive.
So, rather than blasting back with a thesis statement as to what we did wrong, I’ll just say sorry – we’re trying our best here and yeah, things are oftentimes out of our control but in the end, we try to make it right.
Will there be disappointment and committee’s that determine whether or not a sale is, “messed up” or not? I guess so.
Will we be put on blast for screw ups? Nothing a hug can’t fix.
All kidding aside, thanks for the feedback on this – we’re definitely excited about the sale and look forward to letting our Canadian friends know what we’re putting together next week, closer to Black Friday.
Black Friday Deal Inspiration
I do however, want to explain the reasoning behind the BF sale as there was a method to the madness:
The inspiration for this deal came from the fact that we are launching an smart bulb line. One of the major gaps in the smart home industry is the fact that people either choose smart bulbs or they choose smart switches and there’s typically no way for them to communicate effectively. A lot of people start with smart bulbs and then realize that if power is cut to them, they are useless. This leaves a choice – do I keep my smart bulbs and put tape over the switches or do I, “upgrade” to switches and get rid of the bulbs?
The ladder is a tough pill to swallow as color smart bulbs are pretty sweet. So, the search for a smart switch that can control bulbs ensues and hopefully people stumble on our switches.
However, since most bulbs are Hue (ZigBee) there are limitations with our switches in how it can communicate effectively with the Hue bulb (as our switches are Z-Wave and Hue is ZigBee), so the user experience isn’t the greatest. We wanted to solve for this by launching a Z-Wave line of bulbs that can be directly associated with our switches so that they can be dimmed up/down in real time, change colors, etc – all from the switch.
The challenge, however, is that there are so many RGBW bulbs out there – how do we get our message out about what these bulbs can do and what problems they solve for?
Do we offer bulbs at a discount? Likely not going to work as we’d never be able to compete via pricing and still, we’d have to communicate our message (that the switches and bulbs work together) effectively, which is also next to impossible to do by Black Friday.
So, as we collectively scratched our heads, we came up with the idea of giving them away for free with our dimmers that would launch. This would be the perfect way to show that these work together and also get them out into the market to hopefully have people talk about them (rather than hoping they’d buy the bulbs and maybe talk about it).
We as a team thought this was an amazing idea and killer deal (still do) and we’re excited to share it with you (still are)!
Thanks for the response @Eric_Inovelli it’s an interesting perspective on the smart bulbs and it makes sense but I (like many people here from the sounds of it) have no where in my house that uses those bulbs except for a lamp which doesn’t have a regular switch, it feels like a wireless remote switch (in the same style as the existing ones) would make a lot more sense with people wanting to using them in lamps.
Of course if you could make a GU10 version of the bulbs I’d be very interested in that while also being terrified of the cost.
Incidentally I quite liked the fact that the blacks and the reds were on sale at different times in Canada, it allowed me to buy blacks to test them then buy reds to augment those later on.
