CompuServe Thread

Today's Amiga distributors buy for 40 percent of retail, or 60 percent off. (For software.) So the publisher sees $20 for a $50 product. I've known some companies that drop to 70 percent off if they think the distributor is buying a large quantity, or even shave a few points here or there to spur them to buy more. As for the price a dealer pays, it slides accordingly – if the distributor is buying cheap, they pass it on to the dealer. As you said, I think they add ten or fifteen percent to the price, to cover their own costs. Typically, you can buy InterChange (a $49.95 product) for about $30 mail order. For a product with limited appeal, like this Pro Draw <-> Adobe Illustrator converter, I'd need to sell 100 just to cover the cost of a single AmigaWorld ad. Not counting ever paying myself, which most people tend to forget. 🙂 Even if I put this product on the market tomorrow, I doubt I'd ever sell 100 of them.

Nope. Distributors get %60, Dealers get %40, or better if they have a good relationship with the dealer. It's onfortunate (I can't say what I *really* think it is) but it's the way the AMiga market has developed. That's why Black Belt no longer uses distributors. THey take too much, and they help little or not at all. I am speaking of the Amiga distributors, of course – the ones we have had experience with are Southern, American, and MicroPace. BBS->Williams.Ben[AA7AS]

I agree with you about the problems with Amiga Distributors. Besides the problems you are experiencing and you havent even mentioned the criminal activities some of these distributors have gotten away with (Ask Bill Hawes of Arexx about Southern…). They are totally unprofessional in their releationship with dealers. I am Amiga product manager for a new superchain of computer stores opperated by the owners of Inacomp computers and finnanced by Mitsubishi (ComputerCity). They are dealers of almost every major brand of personal computing equipment, including IBM, Apple, Epson, HP, Sun, CBM, NEC, AGFA, etc… They attempted to sell Amigas on equal footing with IBM and Apple. CBM West Coast district Sales thought them an important enough account to assign 2 full time product demostrators there, as well as get them to hire me. They also purchased $50,000 in Amiga flooring in the store (A giant Amiga toy slide/playground for the kids), as well as setting up 14 demos units throughout the stores various areas (Productivity, Video, DTP, Entertainment, etc…). The coorperate purchasers will deal exclusively through distributors, because it is much simpler for bookeeping, provides stock balancing, provides store demos, and more convient product support. The trouble with selling the Amiga is that the Distributors (including all the ones you mentioned) were awfull. They made racial jokes to people over the phone. They did not provide support or demos for their products instead they refered us to the vendor. They were not equipted to provide the kind of credit terms that Mitsubishi required/is intitled to. Basically they were completely unprofessional. Then we called the vendors and the vendors were just as bad! They would try to steal the accounts away from their own distributors, they would not provide dealer demos, they were not honest about their upgrade policies, etc… I have allready made a very angry post to Impulse in the Vendors forum, as they were a perfect example of a [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] company operating in a way that will keep the Amiga from ever being sold in a big chain, like ComputerCity. Predictably, they made no response, but I have been swamped with mail from other people who had similar problems. Things really need to improve in the Amigas third party market if the Amiga is to succeed. I am sick of people blaming CBM for problems, when they went out of their way to make the Amiga succeed at ComputerCity, while the third parties and distributors feel on their face! -Jason71341,533

I don't know what you mean by "watch." Do you mean having a tech support line, and a warm body available to answer the questions during business hours? What do you think, when you call a company to get help and you get an answering machine? You think the company's run by someone who's got two jobs, and that never gives me the warm fuzzies. In my mind, it's a more complex weighing of potential versus work expended versus work yet to be expended. Should I spend 40 more hours working on some aspect of TSSnet, or this Adobe <-> Pro Draw converter, or at a $XX an hour consulting job down the road?