I think its because some dealers buy in bulk and can sell for less than other dealers can buy their stock for. That means only the sellers with the most money will be making more money because the others can’t compete and might as well close down, then the when the big sellers are the only ones left they can charge high prices because they have no competition.
For most of my flashlight purchases I have contacted the seller and negotiated a price that we are both happy with which is usually way under MSRP
Of course I don’t like high fixed prices but its nothing a a email or coupon code can’t fix.
If you view the advertised price as the the starting point for negotiation then 90% of the time you will get a better deal.
MAP is not price fixing. The acronym stands for Minimum Advertised Price.
You can sell it for whatever you want to, just don’t advertise below a certain number. The problem is, it leads down a path of temptation towards antitrust (true price fixing).
Any supplier-retailer MAP (or non-MAP) agreement should be in writing and up front, and carefully written. Retail Price Maintenance is illegal in some countries.
On this and any other forum, we can post reseller advertised prices until the cows come home. The MAP-bound price is on the seller’s site, not BLF.
We can post after-coupon prices as well, although this may lead to the seller getting heat from the supplier. Even though they did not post the price, it is now advertised somewhere.
My suggestion is to post the advertised price and mention the coupon and discount percentage.
Some examples given above are not that realistic and are more-or-less taking place in a vacuum (assumes only one manufacturer). A single manufacturer may try to fix it’s prices, but another can take the opportunity to walk in and undercut them with their own product. Note that selling below cost with the intent to drive a competitor out of the market is illegal as well.
I agree. Manufacturers have MAP, I don’t care. It just shouldn’t be our problem.
If forum members talk about a low price offered (but not explicitly advertised) by one dealer, another dealer shouldn’t take that and go crying to the manufacturer about it. It was a forum discussion, not an advertisement.
In the past, I thought that not disclosing prices was a small price worth paying to keep good sellers like IS out of trouble. But I’ve come around. MAP shouldn’t be our problem. We should be free to discuss what we want here.
I totally agree.
I don’t see how they can threaten with the MAP agreement upon a retailer, when one of us has posted the price here.
Looks like legally that would be a preach of contract on the manufactures part, if they pulled there products from the retailer for our actions.
I re-read my posts, i was not suggesting that MAP is price fixing, but that its the closest legal relative, it attempts to keep prices high, but is not the aforementioned illegal price fixing.
This is perhaps one of the biggest flaws in capitalism, you can get big enough to drive competitors out of business (through many practices, not just “competition”) until you have a monopoly situation and then charge whatever you want and keep new entrants from succeeding in the marketplace, Oligopolies can operate similarly through collusion, gentleman’s agreements and so forth
Let’s go back to the original premise of this thread, and I will add why it came about: FT publishes a net price of about $49 for its SWM D40A. Some are not comfortable with the announcement for the possible backlash of the MAP thing. To simplify matters, again, like what happened to the Crelant and Fenix brands, do we allow now, from the buyer’s perspective, any manufacturer/wholeseller to put the brakes again?
Why can’t they just allow the retailer to publish whatever price he intends, instead of having go through coupon codes, etc. of which not all of us has information about? If after the coupon code the final amount received by the seller is the same, with or without the MAP, what then is the logic of this MAP thing?
This is just one example, but it’s a real example. Many sellers have policies for matching the lowest advertised price.
And you wouldn’t believe the kind of sh*t some customers pull in order to get a seller to price match.
Back in the day, Costco/Priceclub and some other warehouse stores wouldn’t let you photograph their prices. Part of it was so that customers wouldn’t take photos of price tags, claim that that counted as “advertised prices”, and use them to get other sellers to price match (it was easier to enforce back then because no one had camera phones) but people tried to do it anyway.
I’m sure people have taken prices discussed in this forum and tried to get sellers to match also.
The worst thing about customers like that is that when you tell them to go buy the item from the other place, they hem and haw and make some excuse why they want to buy it from you. And it’s usually stuff like we’re closer to them or we have better customer service or whatever. Those are value added things and they wonder why we charge more.
thats exactly what happened with crelant and madecov... the actual posts involving this have been deleted, so no proof... but i followed that thread from the beginning because one i like mark hes a good seller, and two i liked crelant products... then drama because people had to push to try and get a US retailer to try and match a china retailers price... it cant happen when its a chinese product and a chinese retailer. just not possible, too much overhead.
MAP is not price fixing. Price fixing is done with manufacturers sit down together and decide the price together, this is illegal because it is not fair to consumer like us. MAP is done with the manufacturer judging base on their cost, market competition, etc. Because there are millions of consumers, it won’t happen that everyone sit down together and decide the price a product should sell, and it is difficult to decide, so we let market force decide the price.
Why MAP?
My understanding is it is to protect small or medium size seller. Imagine seller A is super rich and can buy 100 flashlight for stock while other sellers can only buy 20 flashlight for stock. Because of higher quantity, seller A ask for more discount let’s say 15 percents. So without MAP, seller A can always sell at price lower than other sellers. Other sellers will find it hard to sell and at the end, we have fewer sellers. Fewer sellers mean no good to buyer.
But is FT very rich compare to other sellers? I am not sure about it. FT strategy might be to sell more with lower profit margin. To the eyes of other sellers, that will force them to lower price either and reduce their margin. And if manufacturer doesn’t step in, these sellers will not order from manufacturer if they have a lot of stock to clear. I think FT should just follow MAP and let the informed buyer to applied the right coupon code.
At the end, I think MAP is good for both seller and buyer. It is not legal term of price fixing as claimed because the price is still negotiable through emails or coupon code applied. FT should cooperate with manufacturer. And I wish to buy Fenix or Crelant from them.
I think it is fair to everyone. If a buyer do more research and found a coupon, he/she deserve some discount. It is like if someone spend more time and effort to compare price of product in different shops, then he can buy it at lower price.
tatasal, I think MAP is good. The bad one is manufacturer controlled price. Where if a seller is found selling below price manufacturer has set, he will be out.
I don’t know what is that called, if it is called MCP, it is much worse than MAP if you think MAP is bad.
you can’t be serious, a customer buys a product based on many factors, and if people consider price to be the determinant then you would call them idiot customers?
How many people have stable jobs, or make a living wage? How many have disposable income because they have family or healthcare obligations? How many know the profit margin that a retailer is making because they know the wholesale price of the item, the retailers employee costs, overhead, utility costs, taxes and rent?
All you see is the final sale price, can you tell me Cree’s margin on a single XM-L2 U2 chip?
I say list the MAP price with the understanding a discount of 10-15-20% can be had through a code like they did with the Nitecore items. = happy buyer, happy seller and happy manufacturer. As long as you list the price they say is least amount you can sell item as a “special” or on sale or how ever you want to word it.
Bort, you took my comment completely out of context. There’s obviously nothing wrong with getting a good deal.
“Idiot customers” were people who took a price disclosed in a forum post and tried to get a US seller to price match a Chinese seller. Why didn’t they just buy it from the Chinese seller? Why? Because they are idiots… not that there’s anything wrong with that per se.
I’m not sure how this part relates to the first or even what point you are trying to make. But I just want to point out that flashlights, at least of the kind that gets discussed here, are non-essential goods. These are essentially luxury items. There is no valid argument that can be made that these flashlights SHOULD cost less.
I dont like when certain companies try to enforce MAP onto sellers, for example the way NiteCore did with FastTech!
Other than that, whats the point of MAP? Creating false perception in the market that your product is somehow magically superior to the competition just because of premium price? Knowing that seller actually paid the same for your product and simply is unable to lower the price to gain more sales=more profit is just wishful thinking.
But it looks like it works, doesnt it?
So luxury should cost more then essentials, is that the argument?
There are few items that one can claim cannot be essential to somebody, i can agree that a $2000 handbag does not resemble an essential item, but say one does security work in dark alleys or buildings, a flashlight could mean the difference between life and death. Not essential (in this context)?
Who gets to decide what is or is not essential, and one of the tenets of capitalism is that competitiveness should lead to innovation and lower prices for consumers, should this be restricted to ‘essential’ items.
i have a stable job... living wage? thats questionable when i have two kids and a fiance i am making a priority to put threw collage...
i know that a lot of us retailers have a fairly high overhead. i also know its easier for cinese retailers to get the items from chinese manufactures... but....
say fasttech was allowed to buy, lets say the 7g5cs, for the same price per piece as a us dealer.. lets call that $35 a piece for 100 pieces. then they decide to charge $55. they out sell all other dealers by $40 or so. they corner the market on that 7g5cs. they then decide to jack the price up to $125. first of all, the other dealers will have stock that they also bought at $35 a piece. crelant will also still be selling that same piece at $35 a piece for 100 pieces. so, will not be hard to keep the price from being jacked up by the dealer trying to corner the market on the 7g5cs.
the us dealers may have to pay shipping and taxes on the item, but will still be able to still charge their initial price of $95, or even less if they still have stock to clear out.
its not like a lot of these flashlights are limited runs by one person running a lathe.
just silly thinking that one chinese seller trying to sell as many pieces at the best price will be able to corner the marked and jack prices up to an unreasonable amount