Serious question, who would you blame for that? The government for the high tax rate? Or the companies for not including VAT into the advertized price?
I think you misunderstand - after applying the current exchange rate ($99->£64) and 20% VAT (£64->£76.80) we are left with £22.20 difference between the US and UK prices - a 29% hike after taking taxes into account.
This is most definitely down to the seller setting prices higher in the UK, and significantly so. It makes me feel ripped off, so I won't buy one.
They do have to offer a much higher level of warranty in the EU than they do in the US. While I have no idea whether the OUYA team thought of this, I suspect that it impacts the entire electronics industry.
For example, I had a laptop fail on me (years ago) due to a poorly designed motherboard, device fails at about 13 months old of course, manufacturer offers a new mb for close to the cost of a comparable low-mid end laptop. I sign up to a forum and find the thread, add my rant, buy a new laptop and forget about it. Except on the forum thread the european users are claiming that they are getting their laptops fixed free because the manufacturer is obliged to fix product flaws (which this clearly was) for three years. If that is true, then it has to be factored into the price also.
That's very true, we do have a lot of rules in the UK and the EU about things being "fit for purpose" and "reasonable expectations" of how long they should last. There was some muttering recently about that being a very long time indeed (10 years?) for some appliances. And a standard 90 day electronics warranty would not fly here.
I think Apple got into trouble with this recently too, when selling Apple Care it was pointed out to them that people already had a legal right to longer/stronger warranty conditions than Apple were selling them, in some countries.
I would be interested to read a proper evaluation/analysis of the effect this has on pricing levels and profitability of hardware businesses in the EU.
I would be interested to know this myself. Some insight into the $->£ 1:1 conversion would be nice.
I'm not saying there isn't a justification here, it's just I've never heard of one. There may not be one as we all know that price is often best set at what the market will bear, and someone probably decided that it was a good price point for the UK market.
I'm not sure the business rates. According to what I can find, as an individual, I could buy one of these from the US and only be liable for the 20% VAT I've already accounted for, as the electronics->consoles category seems to be exempt from any duty.
I'm not sure if this is true for businesses, finding that info seems to be non-trivial.
--edit-- So far as I can tell (from gov.uk)
"The commodity code for importing is 9504500000.
Importing from outside the EU is subject to a third country duty of 0.00 %."
Heh, and I'm sure we could swallow some or all of the rest of it in postal costs in general, were I to order one for personal import from the US.
BUT if we're examining the £99 price point, I'd assume there would be economies of scale for the importer that's shipping to (for instance) amazon.co.uk, in terms of US->UK shipping. And that's if it is all shipped from the US to the UK, rather than coming from the Chinese manufacturer via the Hong-Kong distributor straight to Britain, in which case the costs should be comparable.
I probably couldn't personally import one from the US for much cheaper than the UK price, but that doesn't mean I can't still feel a bit miffed!
