ATTN: Anyone who was considering a V1S/V2S preorder through BTOTech...

http://geared2play.com/phpbb/nfphpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1919&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

Basically, Asus has refused to supply notebooks to BTOTech because they are in violation of Asus' price-fixing policy. To my knowledge, price-fixing is a felony as dictated by the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Any thoughts on what should be done about this? A lot of us were riding on this offer, and I think Eddie should push for some kind of settlement with Asus over not informing a reseller of this policy and also for price-fixing.

Since this isn't really about buying notebooks (since we can't anymore) I figured this was the appropriate place to put it.

 

I posted a thread on this at the exact same time.

I don't know what to do now.

I too want to push for us to get the pre-orders, but I think in the end might be best to go with another seller.

Maybe Btotech can come to an agreement where instead of giving a discount to those that pre-ordered they charge full price and throw in the 160gig 7200 rpm haredrive or docking station or something.

 

Eddie was well aware of it as were all resellers, He took a risk offering below the MRRSP (1805 for V1S) and it sucks that he got caught but he was disobeying the rules, Others (Like MileStonePC) got around it by offering very decent package deals, But dont blame Asus here.

 

The price-fixing is what irks me though. As a supplier, Asus shouldn't care whether or not the person they supply to makes a profit or not as long as they (Asus) get a fair price.

 

Usually, I am not too kind towards rule-breakers...But price-fixing? I7d say everyone should break that rules...What do Asus think they are? Apple? Bleh.

 

I'm not sure what to do about the situation, either. I was so looking forward to making the purchase this weekend, with the hopes of having the V1s in my hands by the end of next week.

I'm really bummed about this.

Has anyone that signed up for the pre-order on AsusForums gotten in touch with them to get any additional information, like how long they will be delayed in receiving their allocations? I think MilestonePC mentioned before that he was "grounded" by Asus for a couple of weeks for a similar situation in the past.

I saw a couple people mention on here that they placed their order with other vendors last night, and the laptop was shipped out today. I'm tempted to go ahead and order from someone else, but I'd like to have all the information I can get before I make that decision.

 

Asus sets that price for a number of reasons, Mainly to protect sellers from others undercutting them, And to protect their brand name.

 

BTOTech has stated that they do not have an ETA and they are not 100% sure they will be receiving stock of the V2S or V1S.

Frankly, I feel wronged by Asus.

I have been purchasing almost exclusively Asus Motherboards for years now for at least 10 PC builds, aside from ONE MSI board. If Asus continues to partake in price fixing, I will not purchase an Asus product in the future. This is not how to build or KEEP brand loyalty, Asus.

 

To my knowledge, this is not price fixing. Price fixing is when two (or more) competitors agree on a price in order to maximize profit. Price fixing would be occurring if all the retailers said they would be selling the V2s for $2300.

Asus is not setting a price with a competitor (such as Sony or HP), but rather stipulating grounds on which they will do business with the retailer. Asus can refuse to do business with anybody they want, and since Eddie has been offering these deals without the stock in hand, well, Asus can simply cancel the shipment.

 

It's actually veritcal price fixing which does not have anything to do with competitors, but rather manufacturers and resellers. It's called "resale price maintenance" and it's legality has been fought over for years. Basically, ever since June of this year, the determination has been that restraints like this are okay as judged by the "rule of reason". So, reasonable restraints are okay, legally. However, $110 off MSRP is a 6% discount. In my opinion, it's unreasonable to not allow a 6% discount. I think there's a possibility that a court of law may find Asus's activities illegal considering they are fairly unreasonable restraints.

I'm upset that Asus is doing this, legal or not. They are hurting their resellers and their customers. As a loyal customer of Asus, I take personal offense to the fact that there will be a delay, possibly permanent, in my receiving of one of their products by their decision. I refuse to lay blame on BTOTech, as they were if anything only trying to build an Asus customer base by allowing discounted pre-orders.

 

Its a risk you take with pre-orders, And Ive seen eddie state before that he will never do pre-orders again so Im not sure why he did this time. For a brand new release 6% is quite a reasonable discount, I dont mean this offensively, But you shouldnt be complaining, the USA gets them far cheaper than anywhere else in the world does, Despite the fact that these machines are being manufactured in Asia which Australia has a number of free trade agreements with and we are very close by geographically, Our RRP is 2600 AUD (2250USD), Yours is 1900 USD. In the UK they pay even more and its the same for Europe.

 

Do you mean reasonable or unreasonable? Because I think it's a reasonable discount and that it's unreasonable for Asus to disallow it. And I'm not complaining about the price. I'm fine with paying MSRP for the laptop. My point is that I feel wronged by Asus. I fairly pre-ordered a product that I may now have to get through other means, by no fault of my own. I find that this is the fault of Asus's faulty and possibly illegal policies.

 

Like I said in the V1s lounge, MilestonePC called it. I doubt that Eddie didn't realize this was a possibility.

 

What's funny about that is that prior to June 28, 2007, Asus's "resale price maintenance" was considered banned in the US and automatically illegal. Was MilestonePC's incident with them before then? Heh.

 

You shouldnt be blaming Asus here, They are protecting their Resellers and in doing so their customers, If they didnt set a MSRP Big businesses could undercut heavily and cut out smaller resellers, Its ironic that its the small reseller thats being effected but that policy is there for a reason and Eddie was aware of it. Stop your whining and pre order from somewhere else, Its not that big of a deal.

 

MSRP is not law. We can sell it at whatever price they want (as long as it makes sense, a business is there to make money). However, it's more a question of whether the pre-order price actually correctly reflects what the actual unit price will be of the exact unit and models he will be getting.

ex: V1J originally came out with a T2400 and a X1600. By the time it got to the states, the model had been changed to a T7200 with an X1700. So if people made pre-orders based on the pricing of the original one, only to find the price is higher because they priced it based on the old unit, what do you suppose happens? How do you suppose it looks to the customer? "Oh, ASUS raised the price? WTH, I'm never buying another ASUS again".

Then there's the question of whether it really is because they're not allocating to him because of his price or whether it's based on sales. The majority of the time, allocation is based on your sales figures, not quite so much based on round-robin fairness.

 

The fact is that the resellers buy their notebooks (V2S for example) from Asus at a certain price ($1700 for argument's sake) and everyone has to pay that price per V2S. So, anyone who sells for less than $1700 will be losing money, but Asus still saw 100% of theirs.

So, if Asus is getting their full amount regardless, why should they care what the resellers sell at? It's obvious price fixing.

 

okay I will say it again, What if a big place like wallmart started selling it at $50 less than retail? they dont care that their making a loss as long as it gets people into the store, But other resellers like GenTech and ExcaliburPC who are not large enough to be selling at a loss cannot match that price, Asus is doing this to protect their resellers and their profit, If Asus machines dont have a certain profit margin on them Resellers will not want to carry them.

 

This was a post in another thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2327817&postcount=9

 

Well I'm going to order from someone else I suppose.
The worse thing about this is hopefully now I won't have to wait weeks because of backorder because I waited for Btotech.com.
So the hunt is on.

www.excaliberpc.com
www.gentechpc.com
www.milestonepc.com
www.xoticpc.com

Who's it gonna be!?

 

Thanks for the links, Zydan. I hate looking elsewhere, since I felt like I gave my word on the pre-order post on Eddie's site, but I need to get this laptop soon. I'd wait on BTO to get their shipments, but with no ETA, I can't be very hopeful at this point.

On with the search.

 

I dont think there is any more to add after that well said

 

Excaliberpc has them for $1849 with free shipping, they have 4 left (out of 25) and they post insanely fast (My lappy was in the air to Aus before most other resellers even announced they had them.)

 

While I think price fixing is not a good thing, didn't the Supreme court just rule on it saying it's legal?

IMO, Eddie from BTO has had a little attitude in this forum, enough so that I didn't even consider purchasing from them, makes me wonder if he carried that attitude over to his Asus rep.

I'm sure I'll get flamed for that, but that's how I see it.

 

This is proof of wholesaler-retailer price fixing. Asus demands that all their resellers sell at around the same rate, effectively killing off any semblance of competition. Might as well merge all the resellers together into a single monopolized Asus-only reseller, right?

 

Yep, matt, I had narrowed it down to ExcaliberPC and MilestonePC, and just went with the ExcaliberPC package with the docking station and hot swap battery.

This will be my first laptop of my own (been using IBM T41s and T42s for work), so I can't wait to get my mitts on this thing.

 

Congress just made this legal a couple months ago when they removed the 'price floor' restrictions.

The biggest reason for resellers not selling a lot of Asus notebooks is when there are no good models available for months and months at a time. Maybe you should tell them that.

 

I went with the Three year warranty and the modular battery ^^ If I was living in the USA I would have gotten the 3 years as standard

 

It's not legal, but it's not per se illegal. Rather, the courts will judge such cases of price fixing under the rule of reason.

 

Which is a shame, because in the end it will come down to what the supplier considers a reasonable discount from initial markup.

 

In the U.S. This is called Antitrust. A manufacturer cannot force retailer to sell product at any price point.

 

I think people need to just stop complaining and just find a reseller.

 

I mean it's not like this is in blatant violation of a federal antitrust regulation or anything.

 

Thats pretty horrible though, what Asus is doing to BTOTech. They do offer the lowest prices, but not by much more than some other resellers.

 

You guys should pay heed to what paranoia has said. Asus setting its price for resellers does not violate price-fixing laws. If Asus in collaboration with Dell and Apple priced no notebook under 3000 dollars, that would be illegal. Asus can sell and restrict sales to anyone they please. They are not obligated to sell their products to anyone. If they wish to protect small retailers from those who can sustain major losses, that is their prerogative.

 

Asus is not in competition with itself, so it can set the price of its notebooks. Price-fixing laws only apply to different corporations working in concert to raise prices, and deny the consumer choice.

 

It's not price-fixing in the traditional sense where the higher companies work with each other to set a standard price for a product. In this case, Asus is forcing all of its retailers to set the same price, which means they can't compete with each other for business since they can't do anything about the price. It's vertical price-fixing, where the supplier is forcing its third-party (not owned by Asus) distributors to sell at a price fixed by the supplier. That is ILLEGAL.

Imagine if Exxon-Mobil forced all of its gas stations across the country to sell gas at the same price.

 

There not forcing all resellers to have the same price, Asus is letting Dealers take up to $100 off and add in any extras they like. Seriously, Get over it, All your whining isnt going to make Asus change their mind.

 

Agreed, they're only trying to protect the resellers (and I guess their brand name for that matter).

 

I see how everyone is complaining that Asus is setting prices for their laptops and saying it isn't supposed to be done in the US, but I wonder if any of you realized that Apple is doing the exact same thing you accuse Asus of. Apple authorizes stores to carry their iPods and Macbooks, and the stores cannot choose their own prices. Thats why every store that has new Apple products sells them for the exact same price.

Apparently it looks like its legal to set your own prices for a product. Nintendo, Sony(PS1/2/3), and Microsoft all set their gaming console's prices, and you don't see stores really selling them at whatever lower price they want. So it's not that Asus is a small computer company that's hiding under the antitrust radar. Big companies are doing it, and the government doesn't stop it.

 

You guys are welcome to look wherever you want. I would too. I did want to mention a few things. A lot of us are Americans here. In America business is regulated by the sec and a dozen other government agencies. There are manufacturers who can legally control pricing of their vendors through written agreements or authorizations which specify the right of a dealer to distribute their products and can be revoked. asus has no such right or agreement. If you want to buy product from a manufacturer that participated in apparent questionable practices that are possibly illegal or border on grey matter then suit yourself. If you think as a consumer your rights have been violated/resticted then you should rethink your brand allegiances. All you guys that participated in a preorder here or on our forum should know that a huge part of asus sales come forum forums such nbr and countless others. You should also know that we have honored their requests for specific pricing on our website while others vendors repeatedly disobey. I value freedom of speech and all the liberties awarded to us in the USA consumer and reseller alike. We were bullied by asus and pressured to remove and recant our offers on nbr because other vendors on this forum complained (rightfully so). I always opposed public forum preorders. I stated in my reply here in both preorders that I will ONLY participate if others did as well. I may have contradicted my self by participating in what I always opposed but my intentions were honorable and still are. If you feel like you were wronged by asus you should speak up. Here is what I know
1. we were forewarned via phone conversations that if we did not remove this thread and all others from all forums we would get no allocation at all. We were pressured not to post deals or participate in such preorders because resellers were complaining our price is too low.
2. asus did ship a good quantity of these units out to competitors
3. Asus pressured our suppliers to tell me that we will not be able to buy their product unless we complied to their verbal price guidelines on our website (never in writing). Our forum remains a separate entity and company such as this forum and any other
4. Our supplier confirmed that they had a specific quantity on hold for us. Asus recanted allocation to our supplier’s after our supplier’s sent our order and money. Under the table the reason was there was no more inventories while my sources indicated that this was done on purpose to punish us
5. We were refused shipment after we transfered funds to them. The reason was asus ran out of inventory, while i repeatedly was told by other sources that we were REFUSED allocation and it was sold elsewhere.
If the above is not illegal then it is definitely questionable. If mods feel this entire post should be removed then you are aiding a corporation that continues to operate by questionable means and is actively engaged in discrimination or actions that certainly seem like it.

 

Asus has no authorization process. any vendor with distribution access can sell their products if they can buy them. asus has no legal documents that prevent dealers from selling their product. They never did. they have no right to lock a dealer from selling their product nor do they have a right to pressure dealers to commin to price guidelines

every single company you just mentioned has a specific clause in their dealer authorization forms that allow them to do so. Asus does not!
You are right it is not price fixing traditionally it is not discrimination traditionally. These are all questionable practices. Asus and questionable do not belong in the same sentence. In the recent years i have seen alot of asus and questionable in the same sentence. I am not here to write an essay. I am here to provide the facts. I hope people do not hold a grudge against me. I looked out for all the preorders despite being threatened repeatedly. I will continue to do the same

 

Eddie, I would suggest you take this to them. As a customer (B2B) and reseller, your word has considerably more pull than does ours. I'm not 100% confident about the illegality of Asus' actions, due to what people have said in this thread, but I am certain that it is worth looking into.

 

Oo...that makes sense that they can set prices if they have a written agreement. Thanks for clarifying that.

 

Illegal or not it is most definitely dishonarable and questionable. I hope the people that counted on me understand that and read my whole reply. I hope the resellers that complained (rightfully so) also understand that the same can happen to them and their civil liberties as well as yours were compromised if not taken away. you are 100% wrong. I have no pull at all. Like i said above. The vast majority of asus business comes from review sites such as nbr. The people here have all control. If the people want to acomplish something this is the place to do it. Ergo the preorder group buy. People wanted a good price and they got it. Someone took it away from you by questionable means. when asus comes out with an agreement in writing dictating pricing and authorization then perhaps preorders will be a thing of the past. For now the v1 and v2 pre orders were legal and asus had no right to stand in the way. Anyone that missed the chance were wronged. If you were part of a group buy here you should know that your rights were up in the air because someone felt that the price was too low without any legal tender to dictate dealer pricing here on this forum or on our website or any other website for that matter. That is all i am saying. I will hold my self to my word and offer and will not sell this product on our website until all of you got what you signed up for

 

thanks for clearing things up Eddie. and i appreciate what you do to try to help us buyers.