Price Parity Annoyed Partners

The IT Panchayat in Jodhpur saw immense participation from channel
partners, distributors and vendors. As usual, the same issues like DoA, delayed
back-end payments and price parity were raised. Only the faces were different

With an effort to highlight the issues faced by channel partners, The DQ Week
organized yet another IT Panchayat and this time it charmed Jodhpur, the Sun
City of Rajasthan. The event marked the presence of more than 70 channel
partners who showed their active participation in the discussion.

The channel partners who attended the event made use of this platform as an
opportunity to put their issues before distributors and highlighted the areas
that needed more attention.

The panchayat as usual observed some heated discussions between partners and
distributors; the channel was aggressively looking for response from
distributors on hot issues like price parity, cartel formation, dead on arrival
(DoA) and back-end payment.

(L-R): Sunil Sharma, Business Manager, Fortune Marketing; Anand Sharma, Executive-Channel Sales, SES Technologies; Ajay Chawla, Senior Associate-Sales, Ingram Micro; Anand Mundra, CEO, Infotech; Vinay Gupta, CEO, Frontline; Kailash Gupta, CEO, 4GL Technologies

Anand Sharma, Executive-Channel Sales, SES Technologies highlighted the point
that the relationship between distributors and partners play a vital role in
understanding the customers and giving them the right solution. For this, they
need optimum support from the partners for day-to-day business matters. Partners
agreed to the point that their support can make a difference for the
end-customers.

Partners and distributors collided on various issues, among which DoA cases
and price parity in metros and upcountries remained prominent ones.

“Prices of products of same vendor vary from city to city. Customers complain
considering us to be the cause,” said Gupta. He further highlighted that almost
all companies offer a bad response on DoA cases. This causes ripples on
relationship between them and customers.

Reacting to this point, distributors informed partners that in metros,
purchase volume due to which the prices are low. They also said that price
regulation and swapping of defected products depends on vendors and it is not in
their hand; however, they try to give best possible support to the partners.

The absence of distributors in Jodhpur was yet another issue for which
partners expressed their inconvenience for daily business activities. They said
that for each and every matter they have to rush to Jaipur, which causes
unnecessary loss of time, money and energy. However, they remained apprehensive
about the idea of distributor's presence in the town, as they feared the latter
would enter into single box selling business.