On 09/11/16 12:05, Panny Malialis wrote:
Someone somewhere is milking the sterling situation bigtime. It's worse
than Marmite! [very angry face emoji]
A lot of companies can't cope with price changes. So they have probably
just whacked up the price to makesure they don't lose out if prices go
up again.
I'm surprised you can't just buy from a UK cisco distributor. Expect to
pay some import duty and VAT on kit coming from the US.
For kit that is ultimately priced in dollars, prices have been volatile.
And we also buy a lot of kit in euros, but ultimately that is priced
in dollars as you pay for stuff made in China in Dollars. And pretty
much all components of anything electronic (this CPU, flash memory, ram)
are price in dollars.
I know some people who need minimum 2 weeks notice of a price change to
update prices their systems.
I also think a lot of people thought the currency dips were temporary,
and so hung at on at old prices, only to find they have lost a money on
orders.
I know some of the big distributors work on a daily dollar rate. So
prices stay the same all day today, and change tomorrow. Ok if you
placing big kit orders, but hard if you an an etailer pricing thousands
of orders for drop shipping.
If you are buying from such a distributor (and run at low margin), and
selling thousands of products, then you need to pull the pricelist every
morning and change all your prices. And probably, don't accept any
orders from customers from last order time day before, until you get the
pricelist in the morning.
Add in that cisco always has loads of deals. Discounts for certain
partners. And the deals are never in the price feeds.
So probably safer for a lot of web shops to just whack 30% extra on the
price to makesure they don't lose out.
***
There is always grey market cisco kit around. They are globally sold
products. Always in another country there is an account manager a bit
short of target, or a special deal on something. Somebody has spares
that end up on ebay or amazon. I would guess that as prices have gone
up, the stock people have laying around has moved as people scramble to
fulfil orders. Cisco dead against this.
But if you are small guy, just want something with minimum fuss, then
you would just buy online and have done.
--
Tim Bray
[email protected] | +44 7966 479015 | http://www.kooky.org
Huddersfield, UK
