Manufactures are ruff on us dealers: The cost of doing biz

For a independent dealer like Electronics Depot, or bigger guys like Ultimate auto, everyone wants to be authorized dealers of premium brands. This means jumping through some hoops for the manufactures.  The manufactures want to have good dealers that treat their product like they want it treated.

They want dealers that know what they are doing and wont blow the stuff up putting it in. The better the installs the less defective product.  I mentioned before that very little of the premium product is defective, when it goes bad it is usually customer abuse, or install error.

If they have a protected line (JL Audio, Hertz, Audison, Kenwood Excelon, etc) they want you to make a big up front purchase for the year. To make it worse most of the time they want to see growth (they want you to buy more then the year before).

They don't want you to sell it below a certain price while it is a current model.  This sucks because as a dealer you may need to help a customer out every once in a while. The good thing is that you wont find a ton of crappy shops selling the product just to get rid of it unless they are going out of biz, or the product is old. (shops that sell too cheap always go out of biz ya just cant pay rent with good intentions)

They want you to support the whole line.  That means that want you to buy stuff that you don't want to buy. Kenwood wants you to buy kenwood subwoofers (which are ok subs) even if you have have a jl audio W0 (which is a great sub for the money) that fits in the same price category that you think is a better deal for the customer, but i have to buy them in order to sell the Kenwood navigation system that is by far the best on the market!

Last but not least they want you to support their product under warranty.  If you buy it from an authorized dealer the manufacture would like you to send it back get it fixed, or replace it (replacing it usually can only happen if you are the dealer that sold them the product originally, yes most manufacturers track serial number).  This is a benefit for most dealers because they don't want product on the internet warrantied.  Defective return rates for the manufacture are over 80% with internet sales then brick and mortar sales (local retail shops). A returned product cost everybody money so broke stuff is bad. 

If you have read the above you will realize that the retailer is kind of a bad spot. Dose the retailer want to sell the customer product that he thinks is not as good of a value of another product? The answer is sometimes we do sell the customer the product we don't like.  Sometimes we discount the stuff we don't like to give the customer a good deal and hope not to get caught by the manufacture, and sometimes it sits in our stock room collecting dust (and wasting our money) until it is discontinued and we sell it on the internet.  We try recover the money we have into it, and don't have to worry about warranty. Because items sold on the internet officially  have no warranty with most premium manufactures)

More car audio under the magnifying glass later.