Paul Buff
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Chris Beaumont wrote:
On the more expensive stuff you're mostly right, the Vagabond II is almost exactly 1.5x the price, which is totally fair enough given that I think by the time you've done import duty and VAT that's 40+%.
It's the little things that rankle slightly, for example -
11" LTR :
US price : $29.95
UK price : £59.93, which is $91.96 at current exchange rates, over 3 times the price....
I know that PCB Europe isn't directly under your control and is being run by a 3rd party, but seriously?? What the flip??
Also, I don't want to be the teacher's pet snitch, but it's also still ridiculously hard to get a reply from them too, I'm desperately trying to give them (and therefore presumably you) money for a White Lightening X3200, but 1 phone call to someone who said I'd need to e-mail the person who deals with that, 2 e-mails and 2 chases over a 3 week period and I still can't get an answer as to whether they can source it for me and at what price.
As the CEO of a company (rightly) famed for their customer service, I figured you might like to know 
...Show more →
What this shows is a lack of understanding of global economics and business. For years and years, international customers bitched and bitched about how horribly we treated them when they had to pay the every growing air shipping costs and then the VAT taxes, duties, brokerage fees etc, while all the time, paying still higher prices for equivalent products that came from within their own region. So we finally had enough and simply stopped this sort of shipping entirely.
We decided on providing local service and repair presence, at the lowest achievable customer cost via PCB UK. Because the volume does not yet allow any savings by shipping by ocean container, and because this method takes up to seven weeks, shipping to UK and AU is via consolidated air freight . . . cheaper than UPS/FEDEX package service, but more than ocean freight.
Now here's the part people don't understand:
All shippers charge by "dimensional weight". What this means is that a box that measures 12" x 12" x 12" with a $3 pillow in it costs the same amount to ship as the same box if full of Pocket Wizards. Now let's say this box holds 10 Pocket Wizards with a price of, say $2000 US, and the shipping cost of this box is, say $25US. It doesn't take rocket science to see the shipping cost VS product value for the PW box raises the imported cost by 1.25% but that it raises the cost of the pillow by 833%.
Let me break it down to this: The shipping cost VS product cost of an inexpensive product in a great big box is much higher than that of an expensive product in a small box.
Let me get back to the $3 pillow. The importer ignores the urge to make a profit on shipping (as does PCB UK, and says's OK, I'm going to mark up this pillow that I bought at a 10% discount (yes, that's all PCB UK gets) by 30% so I can stay in business and provide service. OK, it cost me $2.70 and $25 to get it here. So I'm going to mark the pillow up by 30% to $3.51 ( a whooping profit of $.81, pass on the $25 shipping cost, and sell it for $28.51. The your governments says "Gimme 20% VAT" So you pay $34.21 in USD for the $3 pillow. The importer makes $.81 and your government makes $5.70, an I, the pillow maker (me), make the 10% less than if I had sold it to a US customer.
So you have three choices: Recognize that nobody except your own government is screwing you and pay the price, or don't buy it.
FYI The cost of Einstein via PCB UK, after currency conversion, is about $764 USD . . . 1.53 times the US price, and your government put $130 of the $764 in their pocket.
So what would you like us to do? Give money away to gain your favor, close PCB UK, or continue do the best we can? Or should we publicly imply customers across the pond are whiners who don't understand global economics?
Of course, this explanation, which took an awful lot of my valuable time, will be greeted by the usual suspects as some sort of bias and condemnation of non Americans. But we Americans are pretty used to that sort of sentiment, particularly now that we have a "leader" who shares and encourages this bias and is itching to impose a VAT on our citizens and thereby raise our prices by 20% so we can be brought down. Of course, that will make products from all other countries 20% more expensive here too.
But my genuine sympathies if you are getting this sort of poor service from PCB UK. This has come up before and we continually pass such comments on to them every time we hear something like this. We won't allow it to continue and will suggest they comment directly on that subject here.
No offense intended.
Edited on Sep 07, 2010 at 11:05 PM · View previous versions
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