{"id":11414,"date":"2011-04-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"local-pc-hardware-pricing-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/features\/11414-local-pc-hardware-pricing-explained","title":{"rendered":"Local PC hardware pricing explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently got the chance to catch up with Prophecy.co.za<\/a>‘s Paul Johnston. Among other things, Paul was able to give us some insight into some of the costs associated with importing PC hardware into South Africa.<\/p>\n

Graphics cards, motherboards, CPUs and most other PC hardware items usually end up costing quite a bit more in SA than they do in the USA. One thing is certain: over the years South Africans have become accustomed to paying a premium for PC hardware. What is not as obvious, is whether these inflated prices are justified. Are we being ripped off, or are we being naive by expecting our prices to be more in line with the USA’s? <\/p>\n

Since Prophecy is a leading hardware reseller in SA, we asked Paul for his thoughts on the matter.<\/p>\n

MyGaming:<\/strong> People regularly complain that hardware pricing in SA is artificially inflated. Do you think this is the case?<\/p>\n

Paul Johnston: <\/strong> This is a tough question. My answer would be yes, hardware in SA is more expensive than it should be … but not by as much as the average person thinks.<\/p>\n

I’ve written a long blog post<\/a> on this going into it in detail, but here are some quick points:<\/p>\n

1. SA is a much smaller market. The cost of setting up local infrastructure for sales and support must be covered by a smaller volume of products.<\/p>\n

2. SA importers and distributors bring in a smaller volume of products than US importers. This results in them paying higher prices for products than the US importers.<\/p>\n

3. Prices in SA are listed including VAT (14%), while US prices are listed excluding local Sales Tax, that differs state to state.<\/p>\n

4. Shipping to SA is more expensive than shipping to the US – we are a smaller market, and a smaller volume of products are shipped to SA.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, for some products the volume sent to SA is not big enough to justify sea freight, while for the US it is.<\/p>\n

5. Yes, some suppliers (and retailers and importers) charge higher mark ups in South Africa than the USA – but I think the larger part of  the higher price we pay is determined by structural differences between the two markets rather than greed.<\/p>\n

As a rule of thumb, I think a fair SA price (inc vat) for a relatively mainstream product should be (at the current exchange rate) about 9.5x the US price, excluding US sales tax. As an example, the cheapest HD 6950 2gb is $264 in the US from New Egg, and cheapest HD 6950 we have is R2552.32.<\/p>\n

Discuss local hardware pricing<\/a> in the forums<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We catch up with a Prophecy.co.za representative to get a firmer understanding as to what contributes to local hardware pricing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}