I am not an expert, but I have seen articles.
France is one of those countries that have started to limit sales of
items within their country to recognized brands. (Or something
similar) They have sued Ebay for allowing sellers to feature
trademarked items from French Companies.
Also what you are buying is called gray market items.
Gray market means it is not illegal, but that it is in a gray area
and the warranty (if there is one) is not necessarily valid.
This might be an explanation or it could be totally off the wall.
Take it with the big load of salt I offer it.
Stewart
At 07:12 PM 10/2/2009, you wrote:
Below is a "Background" section -- it explains only my motivation
for my question, so skip it to the actual question following unless
you like to read stuff.
BACKGROUND =====================
I am a devotee of the fountain pen since my second grade in public
school. Write a lot, tried many brands & models of all prices,
settled on a moderately-priced pen made in France. Since I write so
much, I keep 6 to 8 pens in rotation so that I don't have to fill
ink from a bottle so often. Problem is, I lose pens fairly
frequently (I believe in my house but maybe not), so I have to buy more.
Recently I found that my favorite web store increased the price by 1/3.
Turns out, the sole U.S. importer has demanded that all stores,
including web store, can't offer the pen lower than its list price.
I found an eBay store in France that offers both a "Buy It Now"
price and an auction for that pen. The "Buy It Now" price with both
shipping & insurance is about half price of the U.S. stores. The
auction price is a bit less.
But before finding the eBay store, I searched on Google for stores
in France, Germany, & Italy. Of course, I used the advanced search
to specify the domain but there were very few stores listed on
Google. My eBay store (a large one) from which I bought my pen was
not found on Google. Why does Google not list links to overseas stores?
BTW, there are a lot of examples of many different kinds of
merchandise that are artificially increased in price because of
exclusive contracts for importation into the U.S. by a domestic
company. So far as I know, buying from an overseas company via the
web is not a violation of any exclusive contract by a U.S. company.
END BACKGROUND ====================
Finding web stores & sellers from other countries on Google search
in the U.S. produces unsatisfactory results for me. Specifying the
Google search domain from other countries has proved for me to
produce a limited number of links.
Question: Is there a good way of finding web stores internationally?
From Google, or from other web searches? Is there a way to access
a web search that is primarily directed to an overseas country?
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Rev. Stewart A. Marshall
mailto:popoz...@earthlink.net
Prince of Peace www.princeofpeaceozark.org
Ozark, AL SL 82
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