MSI Referred to Watchdog by Aria

Earlier this year MSI released their 980 GPUs, when doing so they did a special launch offer and priced them at £424. Once this offer was over, MSI requested that its prices were raised to £449 .99 which is £10 under what the minimum suggested price was. One company, Aria, refused to increase its prices in line with MSI’s suggested retail prices despite numerous requests. Other companies then followed Aria as they would lose out on sales if they did not; which is fairly understandable.

This sounds like it’s a win – win for us consumers, right? Not really. The MSRP is there for a reason, one is to ensure that pricing is competitive and also it ensures that the company releasing the product keeps the equity.

“When demand is high and stock is in constraint, around a major launch, we will notice if resellers appear to be selling way below MSRP, which affects the product launch structure and results in the consumer losing faith in the product. We would naturally flag that to the reseller to make sure they have not made a mistake. That’s just good service for the mutual customer.” said MSI in a recent statement “Thinking that they may have mispriced the product, we made contact and tried to solve the situation, which seems to be misunderstood under pressure, and we are working closely to resolve this amicably.” They added.

With Aria refusing to drop the prices, MSI understandably stopped the supply to them and Aria was forced to use alternative products. This doesn’t reflect well on Aria at all as MSI is a very big name in the industry. With Aria being a reasonably small retailer, in comparison to OverclockersUK and Scan for example, it’s hard to see why they would be throwing their weight around.  Hopefully, the issue will be resolved soon and they can start restocking products that they wish to sell.

Source: CRN.