tonky said:I've paid in full for demo equipment equipment. Had them at home for a week or so. When returned the money is credited back in my account. That sort of arrangement works ok.
tonky
davedotco said:tonky said:I've paid in full for demo equipment equipment. Had them at home for a week or so. When returned the money is credited back in my account. That sort of arrangement works ok.
tonky
But costs the dealer a transaction fee both ways.
Running a proper 'bricks and morter' dealership is expensive. A lot of people seem disinclined to pay for the facilities.
Gazzip said:No.
You pay for your demo in your dealer's 40% margin.
Obscene?!! "Obscene mark up" is associated with clothing (£80 for a designer t-shirt?!), jewellery, and furniture (get your sofa half price? Double discount? And with 5 years interest free credit (paid for by the store, and they still make a fat profit!)?. Hell, even pound shops make more profit than hi-fi retailers! If we were working on obscene profit margins, there'd be more dealers around, they'd all have a wider range of stock (with more products in stock ready to go), there'd be better trained staff, and stores would be purpose built with perfect sounding demo rooms. As it stands, most can't even afford to run a store in a city centre any more.Gazzip said:Yes, but for every person who can be bothered to demo there are twenty that will buy kit without listening to it properly. As a small business owner myself I am not trying to suggest that it is easy, but the frankly obscene mark up that dealers make on Hifi equipment does not exactly instil me with any sympathy for their £2.50 loss each way on credit card fees.
Gazzip said:Sorry to have caused offence. I sell professional services, not goods, and judging from the responses on here to my comments from people who do sell real stuff I am way off the mark. Obscene was not a fair word to have used at all in relation to that profit margin. Soz.
I do however think that charging for demos would be an own goal. We have tried charging for our initial consultations, which I guess you could call a demo of sorts, and it put most customers right off. However quite often when we have given our initial advice for free (we are architects) those clients will take it, not appoint us, take our ideas to a builder and ask them to draw plans of what we had just discussed. We just have to suck it up and put the cost of that time on to the fees we charge for projects that do progress.
Charging for demos would not work in my opinion.
paulselwood said:Would you pay for a demo, and if yes. How much ?