That sucks. Brick and mortar stores are fine and dandy for keeping prices high because there is less competition, and maintaining control over who is getting your product. Here's the problem, that's NOT what people want. Any company who isn't embracing the internet for marketing/sales/support, when that's what their customers are asking for is doomed to fail. And, if you're cutting out the little guy from selling your products and relying on big distributors/resellers.... You're putting all of your eggs in a few very large baskets. What happens if any of those distributors/resellers decide to purge some things from their product line?
I work in the Network Architecture/Security industry. One of my vendors, who has been around for over 10 years, used to have a policy that you could not become a reseller unless you kept $1 million worth of inventory. The industry has seen a LOT of small consulting companies pop up over the past few years, and many of these companies were unable to become resellers because they couldn't afford to buy $1 mil worth of inventory. So, instead of recommending this vendor's products, they instead recommended products from a competitor. A couple of years ago, the vendor realized that what they were doing was KILLING their business. You had a ton of startup and small companies hiring consultants recommending the competitor's products, and when those companies grew, they would end up buying more of the competitor's product. They have since done away with their $1 mil inventory requirement. In fact, there is NO inventory requirement anymore, they will drop ship directly to the client. You just fill out a form, have at least one engineer that has been certified on their products, and you're ready to go. Now, they are putting the hurt on their competitors.
So, there are a couple of questions here. Obviously, what is the ratio of distribution for sales of the products through big resellers, small resellers, and websites catering to the DIY guys? The other question that companies completely forget to ask is, how do the DIY sales and the small reseller sales drive sales in general? Does the sale of my products through a certain smaller group of people generate a buzz? If I'm not making a ton of money off a particular group of people, are they still useful to me as a marketing tool?
It's been 10 years since I worked in the advertising/marketing industry, and I used to perform data correlation analysis for marketing purposes to find out the answers to questions similar to what I posted above, running on huge Sun Enterprise servers with multi-TB databases full of raw data. A multi-TB database in 1999 was HUGE.
Anyway, the point is, that sucks. Whatever the reasoning behind it, I'm sure we'll never find out. I suspect that this decision was either a knee-jerk reaction to cost cutting, or something that was recommended by a "consultant" without any data to back up the recommendation.
For the record, I love my ELK system, and I love that they will answer my quick tech support questions. I just wish they would some more technical information on their site so I wouldn't have to send them an email every once in awhile. And, from a sales/marketing standpoint, they need some professional web design. Two of my friends based their opinion of their products off of the website look alone, and I can tell you that it wasn't a positive opinion. Of course, once they actually saw the system in action, they changed their minds.
