The Gear Importer Manifesto!

[Valp]

After reading a couple harsh statements against importing gear from the US for overseas buyer, I was wondering what was the reasoning behind this.

I can't imagine anybody would want to pay twice (or more) the amount of money for any piece of gear. It seems the distributors are quick to update their prices to compensate for the increase in fuel prices, but when it comes time to deal with the decline in value of the USD against europeans currencies, it's no longer a pressing matter. Even before the USD started to tank it didn't make any sense to buy most gear in your own country, but nowadays it's even more ridiculous.

Even when you add express shipping, import taxes and whatever additional costs, you usually pay as low as half to two third of what you would have to shell out for the same thing here.

Now it seems the major arguments against this are that you can't benefit of customer support, and are supporting a "grey market" in the US.

Most of the distributors in the smaller european countries have neither the technical skills or spare parts to address anything more than small malfunction. This means that unless your particular piece of gear is still under full warranty, you will have to pay for shipping to and from the US along with any work the manufacturer will have to do. That's basically the same thing you would do yourself if you ordered direct. You can also forget about any voltage differences because the vast majority of pro audio gear has universal transformers, it's just a matter of changing the fuse (usually you don't even need to).

As for the grey market argument, there are plenty of stores that sell on eBay or even ship internationally. This ensures that it's not stolen material at least and furthermore, they usually have strict recommendations as far as international shipping goes, for example Digidesign forbids sellers to send their products out of the US, that's not the case for a lot of manufacturer.

That leaves us with the question of why are things so much more expensive over here. I mean where does this money go, it's obviously not in taxes or anything else, you can mostly forget about storing as well because you usually have to wait for the distributor to order special from the US anything that isn't a frequent seller (most expensive pro audio gear isn't). If the only reason left for buying local is to support a distributor that marks up gear by 100%, then I think it's time these guys realize that they can't screw people over indefinitely and hopefully will start selling things at an acceptable price.

So the choice is this, pay 3000$ plus 150$ shipping and around 240$ for import taxes and your product is at your door step in usually 4-5 days fully insured, or paying up to 6000$ for the same thing and waiting for up to 3 weeks for it. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would choose the latter.

[magibatalla]

"Amen" from Spain!