Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the US::Apple can no longer sell the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Watch Series 9 in the US. The International Trade Commission issued an import ban on the devices that took effect on December 26th, 2023.
That seems a bit lax.
Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.
BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.
And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.
So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.
This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.
The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.
I didn’t realize that’s how places stock things?
So why do they go along with a manufacuter sale? Is the manufacturer then offering them money to sell it at that price?
A lot of times you’ll see products on sale for the exact same price at all retailers when that happens.
Yeah that’s funded by the brand, Logitech and other big brands would give me MDF and scanback on every product sold during a promotion (that was pushed by said brand). We would not make as much margins per unit sold but we would move bulk product.
MDF would go to the internal marketing team for producing assets / promoting on our socials. Marketing would also give statistics on volume of products in promotion sold, click through rate / views / audience. All highly sought after statistics.
Grey market importers would have products at a cheaper buy price but would not qualify for scanback.
One person from my team had committed a PO for the wrong quantity of a product (100 units instead of 10)
But due to our good relationship that brand helped us run a promotion on that product which ended up being exclusive to our stores and moved lots of flight sticks. We wouldn’t have that kind of support if we were purchasing from a grey market importer.
The other side of retail is a fun experience, but for hardly above minimum Australian wage it wasn’t worth the stress.
Edit: Speaking of LOGI, they were a great bunch to be on the good side of. New release products had stellar margins for our stores, as long as we kept on the MSRP, not following MSRP would lead for us not not receive initial batches of stocks on future launches.
The key phrase is “while supplies last”. They can’t import more, so third party resellers can only get rid of what they already have.