4 ms·
In Europe there is indeed a market for new products that have been bought from manufacturers and resold right away, that's what's called a grey market. This hap
by speleding 6y ago
In Europe there is indeed a market for new products that have been bought from manufacturers and resold right away, that's what's called a grey market. This happens because suppliers tend to use different pricing in countries with a different purchasing power, in order to extract more consumer surplus.
It's not uncommon that if you buy the cheapest product in a webshop in Northern Europe you will find it has a Polish user manual when it arrives. It's not illegal to do that (although suppliers would probably like it to be).
The same happens with servers, just compare USD and EUR prices on the Dell website.
- hvidgaard 6y agoIt should not be considered a grey market. But it should be considered illegal to grossly vary prices inside the EU region. It's an extremely anti consumer practice and all it does is, as you say, extract more money from the consumers.
- speleding 6y agoThere actually are rules that say you cannot charge different prices depending on the location of the buyer, but suppliers trivially manage to circumvent that by making a tiny change and giving it a different SKU. Although I understand the sentiment, I'm not sure I would like additional legislation to try to prevent that. Even if you do manage to make that water tight the end result will probably mean higher prices for the consumers in countries with low purchasing power.
- hvidgaard 6y agoAt no point will the manufacture or distributers sell at a loss unless it's for strategical reasons. Perhaps the prices will go up in the countries with lower purchasing power, but it's bound to go down in the countries with higher purchasing power. That may or may not be intentional, but it's clearly possible to sell it at the low price, so they could just do that.
- Xelbair 6y agoIt is called arbitrage in finance if i recall right. And what should be illegal is pricing things with such huge differences between regions in same market, or have the same brand's product have grossly different quality/composition between regions.
- moonbug 6y agowhy?
- Xelbair 6y agohttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20171009STO85661/same-brand-lower-quality-meps-tackle-unfair-food-practices https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201... because it is exploitative? You use your brand, widely known, to sell inferior product for cheap. I would call it an 'official' counterfeit. Worst case - some of those inferior products were sold at higher markup!
- dangerface 6y ago> In Europe there is indeed a market for new products that have been bought from manufacturers and resold right away. These businesses are called suppliers there is nothing grey / illegal / dodgy about the business model of suppliers.
- DanBC 6y agoTesco lost a long court case in the UK about the right to buy and sell Levi jeans: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/aug/01/clothes.marketingandpr https://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/aug/01/clothes.mar...
- thelastname 6y agoCommon market, hell yeah! And when they are "exporting" goods outside of Poland they get their VAT back(0% VAT). Really cute.