72 HR FLASH Sale! EXTENDED TO FRIDAY!

Thanks @Eric_Inovelli for trying your best!

@Eric_Inovelli It’s available on Amazon.ca right now but at 49$… Will it be available at the special price?

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Nice! I didn’t even realize it was back up tbh. I almost gave up hope!

I’ll start the flash sale shortly and let everyone know.

Thanks for the heads up @simriv123!

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Just ordered 3 of them at 39$!
I hope I will find some times to install them soon :slight_smile:

This purchase wasn’t planned but… Right place at the right moment :slight_smile:

Awesome! Yeah, it took like 5hrs for the pricing to update. Is everything just cold and slow up north or what?!

Sweet! Just grabbed 6, time to replace some of my WeMo “hacks”!

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@Eric_Inovelli I don’t know when the price changed, I was busy working so I could buy your switch :joy::joy:

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Are the Blacks going to be put back on sale as well? I didn’t buy the Blacks during the original flash sale as I was waiting for the Reds to order both at the same time.

Also, what are the exact dimensions of the new switches? Particularly the depth needed inside the electrical boxes.

Hey @cba123, no just the Red Series this time as the Black Series listing did not get shut down during the last Flash Sale.

The depth of the switch is approximately 1.5 inches (3.81cm).

Hope that helps!

Darn on the Blacks. I interpreted your earlier reply 2 weeks ago when the Blacks were still on sale saying you would have another two day sale just for Canada due to the issue, I assumed both would be on sale and held off on ordering the Blacks. Needed Reds and some Blacks where the Reds weren’t needed to save some money.

I guess I will buy all Reds since they are cheaper than Blacks.

Colour me a bit confused on the sales here. Heard good things about inovelli switches on several forums, saw some pop on amazon.ca so grabbed 2 to test. The .ca listing was a giant mess, couldn’t figure out what exactly I was getting. Features said 13 scene programmable, comments and reviews talked about dimmers, and the price point was ok, so why not.

Switches arrive, feature card says not programmable. Now that I’ve made my way to the forum and browsed the site, I learn that the listing was for black series and all messed up. Also learned that this was a sale price, even though there was no indication on the .ca listing of sale or markdown, so my plan to follow up the test with additional purchases was made on bad data.

Now the listings are finally sorted, red and black clearly delineated, and red are cheaper than black. Again had to come here to learn that the red series are currently on sale as a makeup, but not the black.

So, a few questions/requests:
1- why not mark a sale price and date on amazon.ca?
2- why not advertise/spread the word on other forums and in the listing?
3- why not pull the original .ca listing until both could be sorted, and run a synchronized sale? This led to a fair bit of confusion on my end about what product I was getting. The pride you take in your packaging and that is evident in other places was not matched by a level of professionalism in your main customer facing store. Granted amazon can be a pain in the ass for retailers and slow to respond, just seems odd to leave such a mess of a listing up if the intent was to enter the Canadian market with a splash?

Hey @piping_piper - thanks for writing in and for joining the community — we’re excited to have you!

You’re telling me… And I’m sorry for the confusion. As someone who tries to be as nit-picky as possible on things, Amazon really does make my heart rate go up.

Let me try to explain the logic behind the madness that is Amazon Seller Central which may help in understanding some of the issues you’re seeing.

Variations
It’s a love/hate relationship that we have with variations as they are great for keeping Amazon’s search from getting flooded by a single brand (although, looks like there are quite the culprits of listing violations now that I am searching for Z-Wave Switch) but terrible for customer experience as you have seen first hand (ie: dimmers showing up in the Q/A’s, Gen 1’s, Gen 2’s, etc – it’s a real cluster).

The rules Amazon has us abide by is that if you have a product that’s similar in nature (ie: switches), then they must go on the same listing and count as a variation. For example, a light switch listing should go with another light switch listing, a plug listing should go with a plug listing, etc. In this case, since we sometimes have Gen 1 switches for sale (it’s rare, but it does happen), we have to put the Gen 2’s on the same page as they’re both light switches.

Again, the problem is that this can get super confusing for people as there’s both reviews, Q/A’s, etc that are all jumbled on the same page.

What I’m trying to do to make things easier (I just frankly have not had the time) is to re-answer all the Q/A’s for each specific product to make it clear what answer goes to what product.

Yeah, this was definitely an Amazon issue, but we’re happy to make it right. If you bought all Black Series, but wanted Red, shoot me and @Courtney_Inovelli a PM and we’ll get you squared away.

Yup, and while I promise I’m not a blamer, this was also (and still is) an issue. It could be user error, I suppose, but here’s a screenshot from our backend Seller Central account showing that I’ve put the sales price in along with the date. It literally never shows the sales price for some reason.

  1. I’d love to – honestly, I really would. Maybe I’ll look into coupons or something bc clearly the Sale Price, Sale Start Date and Sale End Date, really don’t do much other than reduce the price.
  2. This was more of a flash sale sort of thing where it wasn’t really a coordinated effort to get the word out. It was spontaneous. We will certainly do this for our major sales.
  3. Whew, if only you knew the stellar Seller Support reps we were working with… I wish it was that easy. The Red Series got pulled – we never got a warning nor did we ever get an email with the re-instatement. It just came down and then re-appeared one day. I suppose we could have ran a Black Series sale again with the Red Series, but then we’d have to open it back up in the US as well and we would prefer to not have these always on Flash Sales (sometimes I enjoy a steak dinner instead of Ramen Noodles!)

Needless to say, there’s definitely room to improve and thanks for pointing this out – but I can also assure you that we tried our best to get this coordinated with Amazon, but it was just a complete mess.

If there’s anything we can personally do to make it right for you, please again, reach out to Courtney and I – we’ll be happy to take care of you.

Regards,

Eric

Eric,

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply! Only point I think would be worth mentioning is unless it’s really hard for you to manage, having sale prices at different dates in different countries isnt crazy. ie: if you want a Thanksgiving sale, they’re a month apart depending on what side of the border you’re on.

For getting the sale price, it is a pain in the ass and differs from selling categories. My only experience is listing books, in the books category you need a combination of:
“Buy box” enabled
“List price” or MSRP price enabled
Then you need to change the price and turn on some settings via the promotions page. If you don’t do this, it won’t have a MSRP price to reference and won’t know to show the sale price as a promotion. Promotions page also let’s you make the sale price quantity dependant, ie: flash sale for the first 100 units.

Looks like you might be just changing list price, but your interface looks a bit different than mine.

Yeah definitely - I think for our planned sales this makes total sense. I’ll just have to be sure to put on my bullet proof vest in the forums if there’s a sale in Canada and our fellow American’s get jealous or vice versa!

Good to know, I’ll take a look at the promotions tab. In the past (I think it was early last year) you could enter the sales price in the sales tab shown above and it would cross out the MSRP during the sale, but from what I recall Amazon changed this bc sellers would put crazy high MSRP’s and then just always run a, “sale” where it would show the lower price. But of course, they’d run it indefinitely.

Glad to know there’s another Amazon seller out there in the forums that can help if we need it though!

So, I ordered 18 Reds (really needed a dozen Blacks, and a half dozen Reds) on Friday night, and received them all this morning. I wired up my first one to test so I can spend some time playing with the configurations before blocking off a future weekend to hook up all the other switches. I have Home Assistant, and the Reds were not recognized, so I am going to have to play around with Home Assistant to get the configurations added manually. I saw that someone posted that they had the RGB notifications working with Home Assistant, so I will have to look at that thread to see what I have to do to get it working.

@Eric_Inovelli The Reds are roughly 33mm deep (depth needed inside the electrical box). It’s neat that the Reds have dual wiring holes in the backside, so I ended up using these to eliminate all the wire nuts so that reduces some of the crowding inside the electrical box. But, you should have also included a grounding wire, and not just a white pigtail wire as most people will not have an existing grounding wire.

I should’ve ordered the Blacks and not waited for the Reds (It would have saved me $60 plus tax). I will buy 3 dimmers when they go live.

Hey @cba123, first, thanks for the support – it really means a lot! Hopefully the HA post will help you get that bad boy setup and recognized. I know we were working with them to get the config files recognized off the bat, but I hadn’t heard anything yet, so it looks like maybe it hasn’t gone through yet.

Yeah, we went back and forth on this and the reason we didn’t include it was bc we figured people would just use the grounding wire that was attached to the prior switch so there was no need for a jumper. Whereas oftentimes dumb switches do not have a neutral tied to it and rather the bunch is located in the back and the jumper would be required to go from the cluster to the switch.

Out of curiosity on the ground screw (seriously, I’m asking out of the intention to improve and understand) – did you not have one attached to the dumb switch you had in the wall? Better question, why do you need a ground jumper? Again, just trying to understand so we can see if this is a common issue or not. The cost to add one is nominal, but we also don’t like wasting materials if we don’t have to.

Thanks again for the support and for taking the time out to comment!

The incoming ground wires are terminated to a screw at the back of the metal electrical box.

Dumb switches don’t normally have a ground screw and I believe they rely on the switch mounting screws to ground the switch to the the metal electrical box.

@Eric_Inovelli Thanks for sorting out the Canada listing, I bought five on Friday they arrived yesterday, super stoked to start wiring these up soon!

I’m looking forward to the Dimmers!

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Hmmm… All the switches I’ve ever installed are like this, which have a ground screw on them. Maybe they don’t ground in the older/metal boxes? I honestly don’t know. But it’s definitely good insight and I’m curious to hear what others say!

LOL! The Decora switches in my house have ground screws as well. However, the electricians that wired my house (Oregon, Circa 1996) just twisted all the ground wires together (very nicely I might add) and shoved them into the back of the plastic electrical box… This makes me feel warm and fuzzy… If I want to attach a ground wire to a switch, I have to get a pigtail and use a wire nut to wire everything together.

This is where I appreciate the double wire mounting holes in the Inovelli switches. I can usually get rid of 1-2 wire nuts per install.