DM vs. US$

I have been making the conversions from the prices in DM to US$ for Ulhmann and Allstar and the diferrences are outstanding!!. Sometimes we are charged more than double the price of the original product posted in their web-sites. I wonder if there is a good reason ( taxes i.e. ) or some people are just making a great profit from german fencing equipment in the US.

[Lumberg]

I checked out Prieur's website and noticed that things were cheaper if you buy directly from their website than if you bought them from a distributor in the US.

I guess the difference is in middle man markup costs.

------------------
Lumberg.
"...ahhh, we have sort of a problem here... yeah, you apparently didn't put one of the new cover sheets on your TPS report"

[This message has been edited by Lumberg (edited 02-06-2001).]

[neevel]

Shipping and duty aren't going to account for all that much-- maybe 15-20% at most. The much bigger reason is probably the need to cover fixed overhead (rent/lease on facility, employee wages, travel to NACs, etc.) and earn enough for the owner(s) to live on, given the relatively smaller volume of fencing equiment sales in the U.S.

It's basically the same reason why a copy of an engineering/scientific software package like Matlab, Labview, or Vissim costs
thousands of dollars, while something like Photoshop goes for a few hundred-- Vissim isn't necessarily more complex to produce than Photoshop, but the market for Photoshop is many times larger than the market for Vissim, so the fixed costs of doing business are spread out over more copies.

-Dave Neevel

[edew]

Virtually all fencing vendors sell their equipment at around the same listed prices. They can move a bit with discounts and sales.

That said, their gross profit is around 30-35%. Net after rent, shipping (i.e., sending equipment to NACs and back), salary, etc., is less.

Some equipment make better profit than others. Shoes are the worst, with jackets and such being closer to the 30% than the 35% side of things. I won't tell you what makes the bucks (and it ain't the 10-cent
foil screws).

[MikeHarm]

If you can undercut the other vendors, do it. More competition the better I say.

Mike

[edew]

Conducting predatory pricing in such a small and intimate market may not be a good idea in the long-term. The fencing vendors community thrive reasonably well by not being too cut-throat. It's sort of like a cyclist trying to break out of the peloton. Sooner or later, the rest of the group will catch up and pummel the renegade.

Of course, I'm not alleging people will beat each other up, but many vendors do help each other out, and that extension of gratitude may just disappear for those who do not so nice things.