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I don't know why you're getting down voted as it's a common misconception. Sole distributorship means your company is the only one in a particular territory th
by sfifs 5y ago
I don't know why you're getting down voted as it's a common misconception.
Sole distributorship means your company is the only one in a particular territory that the *manufacturer* will sell to directly - usually in exchange for KPIs around marketing, distribution and maybe service in addition to sales.
Anyone else can buy it in an outside territory - for example from another distributor or even from the manufacturer itself (strange things are known to happen when people's incentives are tied to sales targets) and sell it in your territory. While this is often called "grey channel" or "parallel imports", this is perfectly legal if the importer pays customs duty etc and invariably seems to happen if there is significant price differentiation between territories.
The way to combat grey channel is to price right across territories in a way that it's not worth anyone's while to do parallel imports.
- tw04 5y agoIt also generally means you have no warranty from the manufacturer, as they generally write the agreement to be non-transferable. As a consumer you may have some rights even with gray market, but it's not like a US court is going to be able to force a UK company to honor a warranty they never offered in the first place because they never sold directly into this market.
- namdnay 5y ago> it's not like a US court is going to be able to force a UK company to honor a warranty they never offered in the first place because they never sold directly into this market And if there is an official distributor, they suddenly need to start investigating where every customer got their widget from, because they can't afford to provide warranties on items they didn't get the original markup on
- yaur 5y agoIn this case though Thermoworks has their own branding on Thermapens sold through official channels. If someone were to copy that branding I believe it would be a legitimate counterfeiting situation.
- strenholme 5y agoGoing back to Amazon, this brings up another issue: Amazon’s resellers sometimes claim (or try to imply) that gray market imports are domestic versions of the products being sold. I sometimes see gray market cameras being presented as domestic; I only know they’re gray market because of the price, and because the seller is a known gray market reseller.
- URSpider94 5y agoThis isn’t an Amazon issue, per se. I remember shopping for SLR’s from the back pages of Popular Photography in the 1980’s - all of the best deals were gray market imports.
- jjeaff 5y agoEven large retailers like Costco do this sometimes.
- beervirus 5y agoNot necessarily true. If there are patent and/or trademark licenses involved, the sole distributor may the the only one legally allowed to sell in the territory.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- URSpider94 5y agoNot true. There’s a principle called “first sale doctrine” that basically says that IP rights are exhausted in the first sale of an item. So, as long as they are buying legally made copies of the product, then the company has no legal recourse. You can’t stop someone from buying something in country A and then importing it into country B and reselling it.
- sfifs 5y agoIn the US most famously decided in the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. decision. Publishers often charge significantly different prices across different countries for their owm books and this basically prevented them from blocking parallel imports.