Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - Gear Lust / Lost & Found

Rave About Your Rack Please do not post retail SPAM.

Topic Date User

Australian prices! 18-May-2011 At 2:33:35 PM strerror

Message

(I'm not affiliated with any services I mention in the post, they are just random examples that I know and have experience with!)

I've been lurking here and reading the forums for a while and I've noticed that there are a number of people that regularly visit the forums that run climbing stores and even distributors. I was wondering if you can answer the questions I have around buying climbing gear in Australia.

For those of you who know this and do it yourselves I apologize for the repetition, but it appears most people don't seem to know the following. There are now very reliable (i've used some myself on and off for about 5 years from both the UK and Australia) package forwarding services. An example is myus.com. You join up for a fee, and for that you get a full US postal address, including phone number, and discounts with international couriers. At that point you can now simply go to the online American climbing stores, order what you want and get it shipped for free to your US address (free shipping is ubiquitous in America). The package forwarding then strip out the unnecessary packaging (or leave it if you prefer) and consolidate multiple shipments into one, get the discount from the courier and send it to you. Currently with any purchases under $1000AUD in value there is no import tax, so as long as you don't pass that threshold in one hit, you're fine. The shipping itself typically takes UNDER 4 days from the US, the longest part of the process is normally waiting for the free shipping within the US to get to your address.

The above sounds all fine, but why would you bother? The reason is the absolutely MASSIVE discrepancy in prices between America and Australia which is the main question I have to the shop owners / distributors / anyone else that lurks here and who knows the answer. Why is the price differential so high? Typically the price differential is so high, that your very first purchase (anything over say $120AUD) will actually pay for a full years membership of a package forwarder and the cost of getting the item to you and still save money on buying it locally, subsequent purchases become a steal in comparison. Do a quick comparison on your favourite Australia climbing shop for say a size 6 BD camalot and have a look at backcountrygear.com as a comparison. No it's not unique it's one of a ton of places that sell it near that price.

I'm all for supporting our local shops, in fact I'd prefer to, but knowing that I can import something for under half the price of buying locally, it's hard to justify. Now I've been told that the price is already outrageously high by the time it gets to the shops, so are the distributors to blame? Is there a reason for this? I'm fully aware of all of the federal, state and local taxes that are applied to imports, but these add up to, ~20% at max for climbing gear to the best of my knowledge. Regularly I'll see price differentials in the order of ~100-200%

So is it just the case of Australian commerce milking us because they can and we put up with it? Or is there something I'm not aware of?

Moderators: Apologies if this is in the wrong forum, wasn't sure if it was best to be in here or the "For Sale"