Mobility Scooter Price Match

Now a lot of people who try to buy their first scooter are surprised by several things. The first is the recommended retail price of most mobility scooters. In many cases the RRP of an 8mph mobility scooter could be as much as a small car, around six or seven thousand pounds. The second surprise will be the wild variations in listed prices on some models. Some dealers (less so on the Internet) will NEVER volunteer to discount a product, offer all products at or around the RRP; other dealers however will discount hard, sometimes as much as sixty or seventy percent of the manufacturers recommended price. The third surprise is that some dealers will never list a price at all. For the new consumer of mobility products this seems bizarre and in many ways they are right. Ultimately what drives this strangeness are two things, the manufacturers and the large retailers. Traditionally mobility scooters were sold in one of two ways (if we exclude the Mobility scheme from this discussion), either from shop fronts or by direct marketing. Mobility scooters have always been a low volume product and in order to maintain either expensive property or an expensive sales force it was necessary to make a very large mark up on each unit. In order to get ahead companies would invest in larger properties and more staff in order make sales. Since the advent of the internet this has all changed, now smaller family run businesses are able to take advantage of their low overheads and sell products online at greatly reduced margins. The way to get ahead now for these businesses is to invest in stock and increase volume. This has not been met with joy buy the large established dealers and to finally get to the point, this is what is happening in the market place: in order to maintain market share large dealers put pressure on the manufacturers to keep the prices inflated, the manufacturers put pressure on the small dealers to stop advertising low prices, and in this way the large dealers hope to maintain the status quo for a few more years. Unfortunately for the big dealers the online dealers are getting smarter, some even offering instant mobility scooter price match services that will send you a price beating quote in seconds at the click of a button. The future looks bright for mobility consumers.