HW DEALS : Hardware on Sale

In theory they can charge customs duties on anything you import to the US unless you haul it in yourself and claim a personal exemption. In practice, there is some threshold below which they will not bother, and that is highly dependent on circumstance. I have personally gotten about $600 worth of stuff in without issue. Others will have different stories.

3 Likes

True… the ST might be over the threshold. I’ve never been charged customs fees for anything from Thomann or Juno, but maybe they just weren’t expensive enough?

2 Likes

ditto, i recently got a jomox mbase 11 from them because it was so much cheaper than anywhere else even used ones on reverb/ebay. from what i’ve read, if the item is under $800 you typically won’t pay customs.

i also ordered a doepfer lmk2+ which arrives today and fully expect to pay custom duties on it.

1 Like

well there you go :+1:

I think it‘s on me that I feel fucked for buying on launch.
Note to self: don‘t do that again and keep watching if elektron is coming up with some mindful updates to this pretty pricey machine.

funny, it was the opposite with the digitakt launch. got mine on launch day for €599. then they went up to like 650 or 699 or whatever.

not this time

1 Like

as @plragde mentioned there is a threshold of around $500 to $700 where you are not going to pay any import duties. The most I ever paid was I think around $160 for my Super6, which was around $2500.

The product category and politics also matter. I ordered a Jaspers aluminum stand 3 or 4 years ago when Trump was in the middle of playing hardball on a lot of trade with other countries, and part of that was an extra tariff on all metal products imports from Germany. So even though the Jaspers was only about $300 I paid an additional $80 in tariffs. I ordered the same stand a few weeks ago and it arrived with no tariffs. Unless you handle imports for a living, you really won’t know for sure what tariffs might be until it hits customs, but I would basically budget for it to be equal to sales tax and usually its less.

2 Likes

They’re also £777 on the UK site, which is pretty much how it works with US to UK prices, we always seem to pay the same as the US, but in £ instead of $ (largely because of VAT, I presume).

I got mine brand new on launch day for £799, now it’s £777.

Not exactly a huge price drop.

They’re also holding their value pretty well on the second hand market, sold mine for about £700 last week.

With chip shortages, Brexit, Inflation and all the supply chain issues, a bit of price fluctuation seems reasonable, hardly a measure of a product’s popularity.

5 Likes

that’s Sweet. in Europe we get hammered with import duty on anything over a tenner :laughing:

1 Like

The dollar and euro being roughly 1:1 is certainly making me investigate a Thomann order. The only thing I can think of at the moment is the Elysia Karacter Qube, which is currently $766. I’m about to fall into the “f-it, I’m buying it” thread :sweat_smile:

2 Likes

For the current price I think the play is a steal.

In Germany they are still 915€ at Thomann (949€ everywhere else as far as I can tell). The lower price in dollars could also be due to the dollar being almost at parity with the euro currently, the last few months have been terrible for the Euro Zone. Thomann usually calculates its prices online on a Euro base. £777 translates to around the current price in Euro, only dollar-based pricing seems to be off/lower.

1 Like

I also wonder if Thomann is willing to price it lower in the US to gain some portion of this market that otherwise wouldn’t shop with them.

Last one, then I’m going to stop spamming for Thomann, but I feel like this is another genuine deal, and it appears to be below the duty threshold:

Korg Minilogue XD Module for $444 right now.

2 Likes

Site says Korg won’t let them ship to US. That’s what it says when I try to add any Korg items to the cart. Really wanted the Monologue at $222. Oh well.

Confirmed, same for me. Hadn’t encountered that with previous purchases from this site, so it didn’t occur to me to test. Apologies for the misinfo!

This one looks pretty darn good for UK folks after a Syntakt, I’m having to fight it tbh! £719

They have 10% off everything, you can even get a black Moog grandmother with a free SR case for under £700…

5 Likes

Thanks for the tipoff.

Just snagged a b stock syntakt for £629

9 Likes

Looks like there’s one more b-stock in stock , what a bargain!

1 Like

argh