Originally Posted by
NobleSixSeven
So I started my fountain pen hobby as many people here through Goulet Pens, but as I delved deeper into the field, it seems that there is a HUGE markup in both pen and ink sales buying from a North American Retailer compared to a european one:
FOR EXAMPLE:
A Pelikan M1000 is 700-800 USD PLUS TAX ~ totals 800-900 USD
A Pelikan M1000 at Appelboom is 530 USD NO TAX. At CultPens it is 404 USD NO TAX.
Thats almost double the price!!
Same thing with inks:
Diamine Ancient Copper 50mL is $15 PLUS TAX at Goulet, JetPens, Goldspot, etc... but it is 7 bucks at La Couronne du Comte and CultPens..
If you take the price of European retailers as the norm, then US retailers pricing is absolutely exorbitant.
How is the pricing justified?
Reviving the original bit of the post, the pricing of US retailers for imported pen products is set by the US affiliate / marketer. Stores must sell products from, say, Pilot USA, rather than through an unofficial channel in Japan. Ten years ago, Pilot released their Iroshizuku inks, the first luxury inks. Art Brown's pen shop sold Iroshizuku Asa-Gao for about $30 a bottle, while some on-line vendors had it for about $21. I asked Marilyn Brown about it, and, yes, one of the benefits of having actual physical stores was that you could walk in and talk with someone like Warren and Marilyn Brown, who had been working in the family store since the late '30s. Marilyn said that they were selling at the price Pilot USA had set, while on-line vendor X had people buying product in Japan and shipping it to a warehouse in the US.
About a month later, Pilot USA announced that the price would be $30 list and that their vendors could discount to $28 but no lower. Any vendor that bought from anyone other than Pilot USA, or who tried to discount less than $28, could no longer have any Pilot product. There were squeals on FPN, but Pilot Japan and Pilot USA enforced the rule. As Marilyn explained, "Otherwise, Pilot will no longer have a distributor in the US".
My guess is that Pelikan's distributor has set a price below which the M1000 cannot be sold. Same with other products. If enough Pelikan product, for instance, is sold by a vendor in Germany that it hurts Pelikan's US distributor, then Pelikan will probably clobber those German vendors.
(Incidentally, I mostly agree with a comment that TSherbs made somewhere else: don't be taken in by some of the marketing fluff from the Goulets. They don't know much, even though they pretend to be experts. I have their emails sent to spam. You will learn quickly. Instead, learn from places like Richard Binder's site. Pay attention to Ron Zorn's comments in the repairs section. If you all live in a town that has a pen club, go to meetings and ask and listen. Go to pen shows and absorb. I have found that even the most accomplished people in pen-dom, like Richard and Ron are approachable. And funny.)
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