Blancpain

I ran across a website a couple of minutes ago with some Blancpain watches.[Commercial website DELETED as per our forum rules]

 Are these good value for money? I mean, i like the half hunter, but is it a good price for a new watch? Not very fond of buying on the internet..

The details are in dutch: the watch is new with all offical papers, documents and waranty.

cheers

Read their sales policies. The watches probably don't come with factory warranties.

And they are usually gray market watches. Quoted from a site.

What are 'gray market' watches?

There are many places where you can buy fine watches. The most important concept to understand before making a purchase decision is the difference between gray-market versus authorized dealers and how that affects the price, warranty coverage, and resale of a watch you purchase.

All genuine Omega, Rolex and other fine watches come from the maker's factory. The maker only sells them to authorized dealers and distributors. To establish and maintain an authorized dealer relationship and volume discounts, authorized dealers must make large initial investments in inventory and continue to purchase minimum quantities of watches over time. This can involve minimum initial and ongoing inventory purchase requirements as high as US$ 250,000 for a single dealer to carry each major brand.

For smaller dealers, this often forces them to purchase more watches than they can sell directly to their customers and to hold in inventory an excessive amount of merchandise of a single brand. So some authorized dealers sell off at wholesale prices the surplus to the 'gray market' of unauthorized dealers--who then sell the watches at heavier discounts than authorized dealers are allowed to. This is not explicitly illegal, but it usually violates the authorized dealer or resellers agreements with the manufacturer.

The manufacturers, to protect their authorized dealers from the heavier discount offered to the consumer by the non-authorized dealers, refuse to provide in-warranty service on these watches. Unfortunately, this policy usually ends up hurting the uninformed consumer more than it protects the authorized dealers. The reason this policy is an ineffective deterrent is that the customer needs to know this before they buy the watch. But only a small percentage of buyers know this before a purchase. Many do not discover this until after they have a problem and are refused in-warranty service by the manufacturer or an authorized repair center. At that point, the customer sees the manufacturer as the bad guy for refusing to honor a warranty on a watch the customer feels they bought legitimately.

Thank you for that.

I have to ask though, if an AD sells overstock to a Gray market dealer, and sells the stamped but undated warranty card with it, how will the manafacturer know that the watch is not authorized for warranty repair/service ?

Thanks,

floyd

i've never come across a stamped warranty document, but having said that i've never had a problem with any of the watches.

personally i think that grey market watches are a good source for people needing to save money or wanting a good 'deal' but be prepared to pay the repair costs if anything goes wrong which should be a very rare occurence indeed with a brand like this.