Outrageous Price Fixing

#rant mode on#

I really want to buy a Sony Z12 laptop, it's just about perfect, but holy cow are they expensive. I've spent ages looking at different options for tweaking the cost, upgrading myself etc, eventually I figure my best bet is to get the 128gb SSD model, and fit a 2nd hard drive in the CD-rom bay.

so I price it up on sonystyle.co.uk, since I live in the UK.

it comes to £1909 with a core i5-520, 8gb ram and the 128 gb SSD
Currency converter tells me this is $2938

I thought i'd check sonystyle.com the USA version for a comparison

exactly the same spec laptop comes out at $2119 or £1376


so understandably I'm somewhat angry right now. How do Sony justify such a monumental price hike? I could buy a seat on a plane and fly the goddamn laptop back and forth for the difference.

I figured I'd just buy it from the US website, but oh no, sony are wise to that and refuse to ship from there outside the US.

I can't be the first person to suffer from this price gougery, has anyone found a way to buy from sonystyle.com and ship to another country?

if so does your warranty still work abroad?

and why the should i have to pay almost 50% more for the same product????

 

It's the same in australia, it does suck.


Maybe you can use some sort of mail forwarding service?

 

Try a to see what the price is like in a Euro zone country (ie france). If its cheaper, the eurostar ticket/easyjet ticket is quite cheap, and they could customize it for you and give you uk keayboard when assembling (I asked, sony said its totally posible). the only thing is you'll proabbly need a french adress to get it sent to, but maybe they could send it to the Sony store to the main sony store in paris and you pick it up from there... just my 2 pennies worth

 

I feel ya. Sonystyle.de is also significantly cheaper but you can only ship to the billing address on your card otherwise I would have bought my F series from Germany. I had this problem because I live in Ireland and Sony doesn't offer CTO options over here so I ended up buying in the UK and shipping to my parent's house. Had to transfer money back to my old student current account (which has been looong defunct!) and theres an international transfer fee on that too.

US prices can be funky because they tend not to display prices online inclusive of VAT which I think varies from state to state. In the UK, pretty much everything is shown VAT inclusive and of course thats going up in January.

There is the issue of import tax applicable to the states but not so in the Eurozone. The big apparent difference in price doesn't really concern me as you can make that up fairly quickly when you add in VAT, import tax and shipping.

The difference in price between the UK and various Eurozone countries however is much less excusable. The base configuration of a Z12 (V) from Sonystyle.de is 1,479 euros (£1,223). This is inclusive of VAT (@19%).

The base price of a Z12 (V) in the UK is £1,518 inclusive of VAT. Thats a £295 difference for exactly the same thing. Provided you can get the paid leave, you could fly to Berlin from London STN for about £60 in mid October. I imagine you can order it direct from a Sony Centre and pay for/collect it in store.

 

The same applies to many (but not all) laptop brands, not just Sony. In fact, the price hike applies to electronics in general, and computer games, and things in general. The same new release video game that would have cost me 100 bucks in Australia, cost me 65 bucks (including tax) in the US (exchange rate being .9:1). Pepsi sells their drinks for $1.25 for a 600ml bottle here in the US, and rips off Australians for 2.20 (when I used to live there). Then again, I get paid a wage of about 3/5ths of what I'd get paid for exactly the same job position in Australia, and minimum wage is much higher in Australia, so it's not really comparing apples with apples

I'm not sure why they do it, but perhaps they adjust the price to what is relevant to that market, the cost of living, what the consumer is willing to pay. Perhaps there are different fees associated with selling laptops in different countries.

I guess I'm saying, I know how easy it is to feel f-ed off that you're being ripped off. But the price hike extends to many companies offering many different types of products (electronics and cars are particularly noticeable, though, because they're so expensive). If I were you I'd try buying via a relative (if you know anyone who lives in the US) or try seeing if there's an online place that will ship to the UK. Good luck!

 

US is a more competitive market, most electronics are cheaper here...and then there's exchange rate conversions, tariffs, etc.

You should google what price fixing is, though.

 

One reason for difference in pricing between the US and other countries is that in the US, there's almost no consumer protection and regulation. Caveat emptor. Read the small print. If something is broken when you get it home, you can't go back to the store with it unless the store has a return policy. Some do, some don't, and it's up to the consumer to choose where he buys things not only based on price, but to peruse the small print from both the manufacturer and store.

In all of Europe, EU and otherwise, there are consumer protection laws that mandate not only manufacturer's warranty, but also requires the manufacturer to provide parts for a certain span of time, and requires the store to handle all warranty claims on behalf of the customer, and absorb shipping costs for same.
Some countries even have environmental requirements where you can take all old or broken equipment back to the store, who has to dispose of it in an eco-friendly way, at no extra cost to the consumer.

All of this costs, and the consumer pays more upfront, but not necessarily more over the lifetime of a product.

Then there's the cost of nationalization, including translated software, packaging and national keyboards. If the cost is $8 per US keyboard in a volume of 50,000, it may cost $12 per UK keyboard in a volume of 5,000, and who knows how much for a run of 50 Icelandic keyboards. This cost too has to be shifted to the customer, and can be quite substantial.

And, of course, shipping costs. Shipping a container from Shanghai to Rotterdam is far more expensive than shipping it from Shanghai to Seattle. More costs there.
Never mind that many products are first shipped to the US, and from there to Europe. Even bigger costs.

 

Do you know how bad I feel when electronic things are sometimes almost 40% more expensive here in Canada than in US, where we are two neighbouring countries. I can be in US after an hour drive ffs.

 

Hello memnoch, I bought mine from a company called INFINET in Greece. They have a listing in eBay.co.uk (Item ID: 270630439869). The good news is that they have 1-2 in stock and they are very prompt on delivery and very quick replies and support. Just my one penny worth, but I highly recommend them. They ship to UK and at 1940 GBP they include shipping too.

 

I agree on the crazy price differences, I got mine in HK in the end for around 1650, in the Uk the same spec is 2618 and in HK I got a free laptop bag and free speakers worth 70 quid as well. For the price difference you could take a weeks holiday and still have the laptop . btw you can buy the Z12 pretty much anywhere in the world and still get a warranty, the model I got has got 1 yr international repair warranty with Sony.

 

In theory one might believe this but having lived in the UK before, the truth is that none of those things really account for the phenomenon known as "rip off Britain". In Britain everything strangely costs more - just buying a pair of shoelaces in London costs you like 2-3x the price of same in London - and I'm not aware of any warranties or environmental laws that could explain such.

in fact Software ripoffs are sometimes worse than the hardware ones - and they arent even shipping anything.

Also all that stuff about shipping is way off base. In consumer electronics is the item itself that really costs. The cost of shipping is a rather minor expense and would barely even show up on a per item basis. Moreover most of the the UK has incredible population density - 60 million people in a tiny area. So the end point shipping is actually in theory more cost effective than say that of Florida or Chicago where the item costs less.

No, just call it what is is: rip off Britain.