Customer Service in A&S

Martin, AFAIK Celestron use a "regional" distributor in England to supply A&S, which in my opinion does A&S a great injustice because they have to pay a middleman his markup AND the cost of shipping from the UK on top of the price they could import it directly at. I don't understand how they manage to match prices under those conditions but fair play to them if they can keep it up.

AFAIK Celestron use a "regional" distributor in England to supply A&S, which in my opinion does A&S a great injustice because they have to pay a middleman his markup AND the cost of shipping from the UK on top of the price they could import it directly at. I don't understand how they manage to match prices under those conditions but fair play to them if they can keep it up.

From what I leanrned buying a scope a couple of years back...

That regional dealer is who all shops dealing with celestron, here and the UK (and scandanavia (?)), have to go through. They basically are celestron for these islands.

I was told by a UK dealer when enquiring about a scope previously that the dealer themselves takes delivery directly and that the scope doesn't actually go to Herts and then to the individual dealers. From that perspective it should be a level playing field. Meade have the same setup. You become a dealer through Meade UK, but your stock and inventory management is up to you.

You'll notice that the 'regional distributor' in both cases sell the products at the same RRP as is used by most shops.

The injustice from celestron was that they treated Ireland as separate when it suited them. UK shops used to be prohibited from selling scopes to Ireland as this was a different market, much the same way as delaers in the US are prohibited from selling here. And since they had an exclusive dealer in the Republic they effectivly created a monopoly in the sales of celestron equipment. That no longer seems to be the case thankfully which is good for us consumers!

All manufactures are still guilty of having a nice cartel basically in prohibiting selling scopes across the atlantic. One particularly stupid case I ran into a couple of years back was with Orion in the US. They sell products which are remarkably similar to Skywatcher, the difference between my 4" Mak and the Orion 4" mak is the colour. Both apparently come from the same chinese factory. But you cant buy an Orion scope in the US and get it delivered here, you have to go through their UK dealer where the price is higher than for the equivalent skywatcher. In fact if you go to Orions shop in California and pay for a scope in cash there they still won't deliver it to Ireland! In the end I bought the skywatcher scope in Dublin from Andromeda Optics.

After looking at Dobs and bigger arpetures I started to get the feeling that the C6-N was indeed the scope that would suit me best.

Don't worry you'll be infected by Aperture Fever soon enough

Isnt that the truth!, next thing you know, you'll be longing for that 22" dob.:lol:


Celestron are not alone in this cartel , meade are also guilty of this, you cannot get a Meade scope shipped directly from the US, look a the US/EU price difference's, of course there are ways around such as getting a third party involved and having them ship it to you, but then Meade say the warranty is void, meaning you'd have to ship it back to your friend at your own cost, so its a risk you are either willing/not willing to take.

Turlock, congrats on your scope, wishing you many happy years of gazing at the wonderful heavens with it.

I can tell you guys for certain that all celestron gear goes from th US-> uk distributor -> irish dealer. Although I can't say with the same certainty, i'm pretty sure the same goes for meade too. Unless of course you happen to be lidl!! So unfortunately one problem any irish dealer is going to have fo face is paying the 'middleman' as John rightly says. I often wondered why celestron and meade won't just ship straight to their dealers. I guess it probably comes down to the fact that they're not all that bothered about non-US sales (thats just my opinion). Pity because they could make a lot of money if they did it right.

Well done to Turlock on getting your new scope and well done to Carl too.

Thanks folks! Managed to get about an hour or 2 (over 2 sessions) of watching in so far, so amazing to see what's out there in a clear sky.

Biggest moment so far was when I happened across Saturn, just thought is was a bright star until I looked through the eye piece and realised what I was looking at, unbelievable is the only word I could use to describe it.

Look out in the Beginners forum for my next million posts with newbie questions