Clover Collectables 2021 Import Announcement

[quester]

Better late then never, now 3 website in the USA to compare high prices

[jackdanielsx]

Better late then never, now 3 website in the USA to compare high prices

The problem has been shipping. Ten years ago when we started you could reliably ship a single machine for under $80 to almost anywhere in the US. Now it is hard to keep it under $200-250 and to make things worse recently a container went from $6-8K before all the extra costs up to about $25K. This means that now even to start making a profit you have to sell for over $500 and god forbid a machine breaks in transit or someone wants a return - one of these will drain the profits off of about ten sales and they are harder and harder to fight to the point of not being able to and just having to take it as a sunk cost of doing business. Before with efficiency maximized and cheap machines we could sell a machine for about $350 and probably still roughly break even, but now it is riskier and more expensive. The funny thing is the actual base cost of machines really hasn't gone up by too much, it is about 90% shipping / logistics costs.

We are always going to try to be the cheapest in the US, but right now there isn't any way to do it much cheaper until ocean freight gets down to pre pandemic levels (which I think now it is finally getting cheaper, but still way more than it used to be) and / or when fedex and UPS drop their prices (which I doubt will ever happen). Hopefully if we do get decent sales we can get back to doing annual or more than annual shipments again, but until something changes in the system, the market will still settle on a higher price point since nobody has a good way of cutting costs or risks right now.