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How much will you pay for an exotic cartridge....

I noticed on another forum that there is an interesting point brought up by a US distributor/dealer about his perception that one of his potential customers bought a top end cartridge ( that he reps) from an off-shore dealer/source...and how he intends to try and stop the practice of ’grey market’ sales. ( At least for the lines that he carries).
This gent seems to believe that because he signed some paperwork somewhere that may ( or may not) give him exclusive rights to distribute the gear in the US, that he has the right to try and prevent anyone abroad from selling to US customers! To that, he wants to have the manufacturer try and enforce his right to do the above. Now, one could ask, what’s the issue with this, right? And here’s the rub, the dear distributor is adding over $8K to this product for the simple task of ordering and having shipped a cartridge from Japan ( Yes, i know the shipping of such a large and heavy item is expensive...and the dealer has to stand by the product...whatever that means when we are talking of a cartridge!) The profit motive is high here, and the opportunity to fleece some of the US consumers is also...so i get that, but to come on an open forum and complain about the practice that one of his potential customers did such a thing....is an interesting marketing tactic, IMO.
So, my question is this..how much will you pay for that exotic cartridge to insure that you are buying it from a "legit" US rep, and not from a grey market...or in this case out of area dealer....what’s fair to you...a few $$s- or the sky’s the limit??
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Showing 1 response by atmasphere

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atmasphere
11,566 posts
 
A manufacturer that bypasses his distributors in a given country will not have any distributors in that country for long! So it is in their interest if they are in the game for the long run to make sure their product isn’t being gray marketed by one of their other dealers or distributors that has decided to not play by the rules.


So for that simple reason a distributor can often exert pressure on a manufacturer if that distributor does good numbers. Once a relationship like that is ruined, it can be very hard for the manufacturer to get re-established as that sort of thing has a way of spreading. As an example, there is a Canadian speaker manufacturer that started bypassing his dealers here in the US. Dealers here in the US don’t want to do business with him anymore, and other manufacturers like us tend to not recommend his product as its so much harder to deal with.


If you want domestic support for a foreign product, good luck trying to take that to the distributor, even if you bought it second-hand. You got it on the cheap- that is the flip side- you might have to pay more on the other end.
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