Understanding Pricing

You can’t put a price on good service

Here at The Guitar Centre, we do everything we can to keep our prices competitive. However, as more and more people continue to research prices and shop online, we are often asked why things cost more here in Australia than they do overseas. Well, here’s why:

• We are far away from the rest of the world
  Put simply, it costs money to get guitars and music gear all the way here. If you try to calculate shipping on a guitar with American freight carriers, you’ll see that it can cost a couple of hundred dollars, not including customs and quarantine fees. Which leads us to the next point.
• There’s taxes, customs, quarantine and insurance to worry about
  In addition to shipping, there are also a number of other fees to worry about when you bring expensive instruments into the country. GST, customs and insurance all add to the cost (as much as 30% on a $1000 guitar) – and economies of scale don’t matter, as it’s a flat rate whether you bring in one guitar or a hundred.
• There are more middle men
  In the States, guitars go straight from the big manufactures like Fender and Gibson straight to the retailers. But here in Australia, these companies have agreements with specific importers/distributors, which means there is always going to be a middle man’s fee involved.

But we don’t let this get us down. For the most part, guitar players in Australia understand that things cost a little more here, and while we’re happy for you if you’re able to find a great bargain on something online, we still attach great value to the fact that there’s no substitute for holding and feeling and instrument yourself, or for the level of service we can offer in-store.

We hand-pick each and every guitar we sell. We play and inspect them all, and we make sure that they are up to the quality our store is known for. In short, we do all the hands-on testing and feeling that you aren’t able to do online, we set them all up before putting them up for sale, and that’s what makes our guitars play better.