ProSource will form a new joint buying committee for...
ProSource will form a new joint buying committee for headphones and wireless/network products in February to add focus to the audio category, ProSource President David Workman said. The six- to seven-member group will operate separately from ProSource’s core audio buying…
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committee. “With the amount of time spent on core audio we couldn’t focus as much on emerging technologies and this will help us do that,” Workman said. The new committee, which includes members of PRO Buying Group and Brandsource’s Home Entertainment Source (HES), will be the latest addition to the alliance the groups formed in 2009. ProSource has joint buying committees for most categories, the lone exception being custom installation, Workman said. Meanwhile, six to seven PRO Group members have eBay storefronts with additional PRO and HES dealers expected to sign on at CES, Workman said. Under an agreement reached with eBay last year, PRO retailer stores on eBay link back to their own websites and the e-commerce company gets a share of the transactions. A second batch of PRO Group members was expected to launch storefronts last summer, but the process slowed as eBay worked to make dealers and manufacturers aware of the service, Michael Jones, vice president-merchant development, told us. EBay has landed agreements with some CE manufacturers, including Monster, but needs to raise awareness of the service, Jones said. EBay’s efforts also ran into new unilateral pricing policies (UPP) Samsung, Sony and others implemented last year in a bid to stabilize TV pricing. The UPP requirements barred authorized retailers from selling goods via Amazon Marketplace and other third-party sites. The requirement eased as eBay made manufacturers aware of its storefront policies, Jones said. CE manufacturers, including Samsung and Bose, also moved to make UPPs work better with the third-party storefronts, Workman said. EBay is “signing up some new partners and it always intended as a phased rollout” with ProSource, Workman said. “It’s a legitimate, viable alternative platform for retailers. Some manufacturers mistakenly believed that the implementation of UPPs and the third-party sellers were incompatible. But in general the UPPs and the access to markets has shown to standardize the marketplace.”