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OBi200 cost???

Started by Time_Lord, October 01, 2020, 06:37:42 AM

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Time_Lord

What happened to the pricing on the OBi200, I seem to recall they were selling for around $60 now on Amazon they are listed at $170.

Did anything change besides making the unit all black and printing Polycom on the top or just greed?

vtsnaab

Little, tiny boxes with HUGE prices, yep.
Tripling & quadrupling prices ??
(Obviously just doubling must not be enough...)
Just normal corporate greed, of course.

drgeoff

I think you'll find that Amazon themselves have no stock and those high prices on Amazon.com are from other sellers taking advantage.

Time_Lord

even on eBay the used units are selling for roughly $100 shipped sans the odd unit with a buy it now for a low price.

Wonder how OBi, now Polycom got a lock on the Google Voice integration?

SteveInWA

The authorized retailer price has gone up somewhat, but the actual issue here, is that the actual new stock from Poly is sold out, and the price gouging is via third party sellers.  In one example, an eBay seller apparently was playing an arbitrage game:  they bought up a batch of them while in stock, then resold them for a profit on eBay.

vtsnaab

#5
Some of the above fits what I have seen personally...some not so much.

In addition to our 1 perfectly functional Obi box we also have an Ooma Telo - which started being troublesome many weeks ago - so:
I started watching the Obi2xx pricing a while ago in case we needed to ditch the Telo.

From the start of that time no matter which site my searches brought me to - the rock bottom pricing had been around $70.
Then the pricing quickly multiplied no matter whether it was the big A, Newegg, fleabay sellers, office stores, wallymart - or random 3rd party sellers on any of them.

Good thing one can still use a sub-$20 generic ATA with a low priced ITSP & then simply forward the GV number to that.

If this insane pricing sticks around it will only chase more folks away from using Obi boxes, I think.

A brand new Obi2xx box for even ~$50 would be great though, and they'd likely have to ramp up production of the innards (which likely come from offshore makers for all of ~$2 each...just like the innards of the Ooma boxes do.).

techno.express

#6
Amazon has renewed obi202 for $58.83 https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Universal-Adapter-Gateway-Support/dp/B07VCL9J4D the product shows obi212, i received obi202.

All the complaints mentions the same issue, I didn't care, some did and they returned it.

vtsnaab

The big a had the 200 on offer for 49.95, so we grabbed one...
Would have been great if it had a prime day special, but at least now we can ditch the troublesome Ooma box.