Goodbye Amazon
princeton-audio.com
Goodbye Amazon
1–10 of 139 posts
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#2Here's hoping that the anti-trust laws will bring Amazon in line one day. Maybe.
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#3>I'll repeat that: Amazon.com, a reseller, told us that we were not allowed to raise the price of our own product for any reason.
I don't believe this...
Were you actually selling using "Sell on Amazon/Fulfilment by Amazon"? Or some 3rd party using Amazon for you...?
>Amazon's policy is to never return unsold products to manufacturers
https://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by-amazon/...
says that:
>Typically, return requests take 10 to 14 business days to pick, pack and dispatch.
It also goes on to say you can have returned items sent back to you...
>Prior to that, our Amazon buyer had refused to ever reply to any of our questions or requests for support.
Your what?
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#4>Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, [...] If all goes smoothly, this process takes about six weeks.
>Amazon relentlessly pushed us to accept lead-times that were typically only four days, and sometimes demanded fulfillment of orders in as little as 24 hours--including delivery.
Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products. Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor but it certainly isn't Amazon (or Walmart).
One way for Princeton Audio to become compatible with Amazon's short lead times is to run some sophisticated projections (e.g. "demand planning") on the most likely customer combinations[1] and build an inventory of those ahead of time. (Sell semi-custom on Amazon with immediate delivery but fully custom on Princeton's own website with 6-week wait.) However, that requires a big capital investment -- and the hassles of managing inventory.
[1] PA's website shows 32 possible combinations (4 woods x 4 metals x 2 batteries) so maybe prebuild and sell only the most popular 3 configurations on Amazon.com
https://store.princeton-audio.com/products/site1-bluetooth-s...
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#5I wouldn't expect amazon to be a good choice for a custom audio place.
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#6Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, using their preferred tonewoods, choice of hardware, as well as other unique customizations.
This doesn't sound like a good match for selling on Amazon -- Amazon seems more suited for products where you can ramp up production easily to meet demand. And I probably wouldn't buy a $450 handcrafted wood bluetooth speaker on Amazon, assuming that it's some cheap mass produced mess where the wood will delaminate in a year.
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#7When I read sentences like this:
"We steadfastly refuse to be purveyors of cheap, plastic, mass-produced, craptastic speakers made on an assembly line in China that contribute nothing of value to the lives of our customers or the town we call home."
I'm always amazed how much subtle racism seems to be acceptable when it comes to talking about China.
This sentence contains so many hidden assumptions, e.g. "product from china == crap" and "person in our home town earning money == good, person in china earning money == bad".
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#8Our Site:1 speakers are lovingly handcrafted. We make them one at a time, to our customer's desired spec, using their preferred tonewoods, choice of hardware, as well as other unique customizations.
...
The only way to meet their demands would have been to mass-produce huge volumes of speakers featuring no customizations.
How is Amazon even possibly a good place to sell this kind of an item? People overwhelmingly go to Amazon for the cheapest items that are the types of products that are sold at massive scale.
So if you can't by virtue of your business model sell 100,000 SKUs delivered two day prime, then it seems like Amazon would be a terrible place to try and sell.
I mean it looks like they make a fantastic product for a specific subset of audiophiles: ones that don't want a system to dominate their home. However they don't need Amazon's market to get to the scale they claim to want to reach.
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#9This hammer is making a terrible screwdriver. Goodbye hammer and good riddance.
Re: Goodbye Amazon
#10>I'll repeat that: Amazon.com, a reseller, told us that we were not allowed to raise the price of our own product for any reason. I don't believe this... Were you actually selling using "Sell on Amazon/Fulfilment by Amazon"? Or some 3rd party using Amazon for you...? >Amazon's policy is to never return unsold products to manufacturers https://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by-amazon/... says that: >Typical…
From the words they're using, I don't think they were selling on Amazon as a 3rd party seller, it sounds more like Amazon was buying from them on wholesale terms, and then selling to end users as sold and shipped by Amazon.