shy about prices

@tomic601 

tomic 601- arranging a simple global price structure is quite difficult as it the same exact problem you describe accurately above applies to any business in their home market.  So a German company can sell for less in Germany while end users in the US assume the US dealer is ripping them off!   
Brad

@grislybutter

I actually couldn't agree more about how it looks from your side. Its something we have wrestled with and asked ourselves what the right thing is. I think we are going to work on adding prices to our lone mountain site as the need for our customers to find prices on ATC consumer models that no one has in stock is important and I’ll just have to deal with the aftermath.

Brad.

I think there is a lot of misinformation in this thread and it's only just started!    It's clear a lot of people feel factories are just trying to rip everyone off.  My experience having worked for quite a few of them is that there are some people who are trying to take advantage at times but all in all most businesses have to do the right thing or they go under.   Ripping people off for real doesn't last long.  My experience is also that anyone who goes through the tremendous hassle of building stuff, it's not because they want to get rich.  Almost none of them ever do- they make a living and that's about it.  the perception of a company that makes a speaker for $500K is that they are rich rich rich but it may well be they sell one pair a year and in the end they only walk away with 10% of that as profit.    

I think the hard part for most buyers is to comprehend the process of making stuff: the labor, your building to make stuff in, the engineering, the buying of parts from all over the world and then finally to get all of it in one place to build.  It's impossible to have all those steps go well.   Marketing (explaining your stuff) and selling (which is your final income but also involves packaging and shipping and a lot of other details)  is a complex process involving a lot of different people with different agendas.  Shipping right now is nightmare, everything is getting damaged.  Once its sent to a dealer, there's lot of different dealers with different agendas too.  Some are amazing, some aren't.  Hard to tell from another country or even across the country how good someone is with their customers.  Over time, most high end enthusiasts have experienced a full range of these differences and Im sure it feels like a big conspiracy from time to time.  From this side it feels like a slow motion mess, dealing with all the changes that affect one thing or another constantly.  The process of can take a full year to design and build, get the parts and gather them up before you can actually ship the final product.  Building is truly a labor of love as it's so frustrating that you have to really want it.    

Smaller dealers - the ones interested in high end stuff- generally don't have great websites with prices because creating one and keeping it up to date is a significant amount of time investment with the near constant changes from the different  manufacturers.  You want to work all day trying to sell stuff and then all evening  because a cable manufacturer decided they need to change prices?  It's time invested that isn't necessarily productive if your business is geared to dealing with people in person and not selling online.  Why is my website so important if I don't sell anything there?  

If your business is geared towards online, well then you try and keep everything up to date- pictures, prices, data, new models, new products, etc.  But many of these website dealers don't sell some of the exotic high end stuff as the sales are way too small for them.  Or way too complicated.  They want lines that are simpler and sell in higher quantities.  The biggest online stores want to sell what people ask for -not necessarily what is "the best" as they don't even have any employees that understand that stuff.  The ones that understand the high end usually find a high end dealer to work for because selling cheap hi fi speakers and gear all day long is no fun at all.  Selling amazing high performance gear is really fun as you deal with people who really get it.  I have rarely met anyone in high end that was wealthy.  Most of them are ordinary folks passionate about high end audio.      

Manufacturers generally don't post prices as the international traffic on sites is significant ( my own US site sees 25% of our traffic from Germany! I don't sell anything to Germany! ) and there is no way to post prices in all currencies and account for all the different import duties and freight costs that affect the final price in a given country.  When you find yourself competing with another country's prices you soon decide not to post prices anymore.   Besides, the authorized dealers have all the prices.  The ones you don't want selling your stuff don't have prices because they don't understand your stuff anyway.  They just make a mess and can't support the client or the product! 

Brad

@grislybutter

Yes I get that. Frustrating for us both, as we cannot control the dealers or tell them what to do. We can only give them an opportunity-some take it and some dont.

The internet business is a completely different thing to the local shops that rely on relationships (and most likely good advice) to build their business. I grew up in the busness when it was like that and still prefer it. Nothing like a dealer who thinks long term and isnt greedy. There is a hybrid model growng as a few dealers are beginning to offer personal relationships AND internet information. Its a tough go as you need such signficant resources to be good at both. And yes, there are few local shops that offer bad advice, but I think that’s increasingly rare as word travels fast about bad deals and transactions.

Brad

@tomic601

I know one mysterious cost that is hidden for all but the distributor- the tremendous cost of freight from a country far away. THis can add a LOT to the cost of the product by the time you get it!

MAny of these smaller hi fi companies cannot do lower cost sea shipments unless you are importing large volumes, enough to fill a shipping container (holds 10-15 pallets loaded 7-8 foot high) . That’s a lot of stuff. If you are small to medium size you are stuck with air freight on pallets which travels on passenger planes (a lot of folks dont know that’s how airlines really make their money) . The cargo planes (FEDX, UPS, DHL etc) you see at airports is for small package only, NOT pallets. So like a single small box from one person to one person is what’s inside that giant FEDX plane. 

Small package shipment is absolutely brutal on the shipment itself- ESPECIALLY international.. 90% ofl the freight damage comes from small package shipping. So signifcant losses are now normal. If you order 6 preamps, 2 are ruined or unshippable because the box is destroyed or the unit inside has scartch that no one will want. TO sort that out and file a claim is months and months of follow up. Not fun.

I recently had customs drill holes in my ATC crates from UK looking for-I dont know what- drugs? Ruined many pairs of beaugiful wood veneered 50s, 100s 150s with holes in the cabinets!. You cannot go after customs, they can do whatever they see fit to check your crates.

SO cost of crate shipments can run 20-30% on top of the product value- not including losses. So add 20-30% to the street price you pay. That is the biggest reason my ATC is more than UK ATC.

Claims to the contrary ("I got it for $40") is referring to small package shipments only and works on only a very very small scale (you order one used preamp from overseas). This won’t work for a larger boxes as there is a limit to size and weight- a pair of floor standing speakers is not shippable small package.

Brad