[TowerTalk] [ForSale-Swap] More Antenna Analyzers

[jimlux]

Jim Brown wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:52:57 +0000, RICHARD SOLOMON wrote:
> 
>> I find it very frustrating and annoying to go to a Web Site on a
>> product and cannot (or with great difficulty) find the price for it.
> 
>> Are they ashamed for charging such a high price ???
> 
> They are trying to 1) force you to call someone to get a price so 
> that they can give you a hard sales pitch and 2) control the resale 
> price by forcing you to call a dealer. 
> 
>> Those sites turn me off the product very quickly.
> 
> I have exactly the same reaction. The cost of something is an 
> important part of its specifications. If you make it hard for me to 
> find ANY of the specs, I'll run like mad in the other direction. 
> 
> 73,
> 
> Jim Brown K9YC



#1 is sort of lame, I'll agreee

#2 is fairly common with manufacturers who don't sell retail (many 
don't, for good reasons).. As a mfr, you're sort of caught in a bind:
- don't put a MSRP out there, and make folks cranky that they have to 
find a dealer to get a quote, and it's sometimes a pain to get a quote 
from a dealer that has a wide range of lines they carry.
- put a MSRP out there, but it will be high, and then folks think your 
widget is more expensive than it actually is.

Where I used to work, we used the latter strategy. We would sell factory 
direct, but our price was significantly higher than any dealer would 
sell it for, and we never gave discounts: we wanted our dealers 
protected and incentivized to support our product. A typical dealer 
price would be around half or twothirds of the "factory price".