NOV. 13 I EHX, MORLEY I DISTRIBUTION
EHX, Morley Drop Amazon

Sound Enhancement, the manufacturer of Morley and Ebtech brand products, has terminated its relationship with Amazon. While citing various reasons behind its decision, MAP infringements were at the top of the list.

Sound Enhancement CEO Joseph Turek wrote the following statement:

"Sound Enhancement has determined that business practices adopted by Amazon.com are compromising the competitiveness of our brands. Consequently, like others in the music industry, we are following suit and discontinuing sales to Amazon.com.

"While we believe the Amazon Marketplace is an excellent forum for our retailers to sell our products, this will only be successful with the strict adherence to our MAP policy. Like Amazon, if our policy cannot be respected we reserve the right to discontinue sales to that violator.

"We started to compare what value our dealer network brought to the table versus what we saw with Amazon. When you peel back the onion, the picture was rather shocking. Our dealers bring real value to the consumers of our products. They offer real customer service with a human being knowledgeable about our products. They offer advice on how our products work, tips on how to interconnect devices, other products that augment our line and real hand-holding when necessary. That is a huge commitment from our dealers with investments in human resources, training and systems. What does Amazon do concerning customer service? Nothing! You cannot reach a human being for any problem. All the consumer can do is send a product back without recourse and post a message saying how disappointed they were. Unfortunately, those comments are addressed to Morley and not to Amazon. Our brand can get tarnished unjustifiably with no reflection on the lack of support from Amazon. That's just not right.

"What does Amazon do well? They move volumes of commodity products quickly and efficiently through the supply chain at the lowest possible cost to the consumer. They do this at the expense of great customer support. Our dealers have figured out how to become almost as efficient in supply chain management as Amazon. We had to leave Amazon for the good of the consumer and the music industry.

"Sure, it hurts to lose our largest customer in Amazon. But that is short-term pain for long-term gain. We are visionaries that see the music industry resurging and our products need the superior customer support and service offered by our dealers to grow with the industry. For all of these reasons, we finally came to understand what our dealers were telling us; we had to say goodbye to Amazon."

Electro-Harmonix also ended its relationship with Amazon for reasons including MAP pricing, according to company founder Mike Matthews.

In June, Matthews released the following statement:

"Electro-Harmonix has determined that practices adopted by Amazon.com are compromising the competitiveness of our brand.

"Consequently, we are discontinuing sales to Amazon.com. We expect all EHX dealers to refrain from listing EHX pedals on Amazon.com within 60 days."

On top of MAP pricing infringements, Matthews stated that Amazon's return policy also attributed to EHX's decision to end its relationship with Amazon.

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