Keeping Prices High By Keeping Products Off The Web
from the the-flintstones-never-did-this dept
A small nutritional supplement manufacturer is threatening retailers that sell its products that they'll no longer be able to stock them if they make them available for purchase or advertise pricing online. The company's essentially trying to keep prices high by forcing customers to go to local retailers to buy them -- and pay a 100% markup -- rather than being able to purchase the products online from anyone who carries them. It's a strange move, really. The company's wholesale price it charges the vendors shouldn't be impacted by their retail prices, so why wouldn't it want to expand its geographic distribution as much as possible, and make it as easy as people for end consumers to buy its product? The web has a pretty solid record of making retail markets -- both online and off -- more efficient. Ignoring this and not taking advantage of it is short-sighted.
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now this is good
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vitamins?!?
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Re: online items
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Good riddance
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yes, I agree with you that intelligent design is the way it all should stay!
[/sarcasm]
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Re: Good riddance
and see what one manufacturer has to say about internet sales.
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Re: Good riddance
The truth of the matter is that modern science isn't really sure what the net effects of many of the drugs we so willingly advertise...they just notice a correlation in experimental groups where some effect is witnessed that may seem beneficial to some people some of the time.
Medicine: ok; Pharmillionaire (more like billion/trillion today) companies: evil greedy effects of the competition intrinsic to a capitalist society.
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As a retailer....
You can pull this off if you have a unique product that has good demand; it's a bit harder for commodities. As a prior poster pointed out, the market will sort this out quite efficiently. As another prior poster pointed out, the nutritional supplements industry is so full of useless crap that we wouldn't miss them if they went out of business (they won't, unfortunately).
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Violins and Accessories
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No Subject Given
Probably afraid that if they sell it over the 'net, somone might buy it and then give it to a friend and then the supplement company would have to sue because the friend didn't buy his own bottle of the supplements.
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finally a decent contribution to this shitty (oops, i meant muddy) site.
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Lots of examples
For example, Specialized Bicycles won't allow their retailers to show prices online. They'd rather you go in person to a bike retailer and get it. To some extent, they want to make sure you're fitted with the right size frame, but once you know that, who cares where you get it from?
Even eye doctors don't always give you a copy of your contact lens prescription. Their claim is that can ensure quality, which most of the time is never an issue.
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