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Prior to the mid-1980s, much of that difference in price was down to exceedingly high duties and sales taxes, but once the government of the day decided to abolish such things and whack us with a goods and services tax instead, the remainder of the imbalance was mainly due to wholesale and retail margins.

Prior to the arrival of legalised grey-market importing, local distributors often unfairly exploited their monopoly on some goods to extract extortionate prices from the market -- but, thanks in no small way to the Net, those days are long gone!

These days, thanks to the net, online shopping and the ease with which you can pay for stuff overseas using your credit card, local distributors and retailers have no option but to offer their products at competitive prices.

If they try to gouge us too much, we can just fire up our browsers, load up a site such as Google's Froogle and hunt down a competitive price elsewhere.

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As a result of the power this offers the consumer, most retail prices in New Zealand are pretty close to those you'd expect to pay in the USA, Europe or other parts of the world so there's little point in importing directly.

However, there are still some products that really do merit logging on and pulling out the plastic.

A good example of this is music. If the CD you want to buy isn't in the limited range of stuff stocked by The Warehouse at $25 a disc or less then you might find it cheaper off-shore.

And don't let the cost of shipping put you off either -- for US$6-$12 you can get just about anything sent by USPS Global Priority Mail so that it arrives in your mailbox within 5 working days. Amortise that cost over a fist-full of CDs and you won't even notice it.

Recently I've been designing and building a GPS-based guidance system and autopilot for a large jet-powered model aircraft (as a favour to a friend, not for financial gain I might add) and while doing that I discovered that there are still some retailers in New Zealand who haven't quite got the message about gouging.

I found one product that was going to cost exactly twice as much to buy locally as it would to import directly. When I queried the local supplier they said that their price was competitive because they had to pay GST, taxes, freight, etc, etc.

Well the strange thing is that, as the authorised NZ distributor for this product, they would have bought it at less than retail by an amount that would offset the 12.5% GST they had to add, and as I pointed out, freight is a trivial amount these days -- especially when the product concerned weighs just 1.5oz and costs NZ$200 a pop.

I asked whether they could provide four of these items ($800 worth) at a more realistic price but they said they couldn't -- so I organised for my friend to make the purchase directly from the USA and four days later they were in my hands.

How long will it take for this retailer to wake up to the fact that the monopoly protection they used to enjoy has gone and that they simply can't continue to gouge the market like they used to?

I'd like to hear from readers on the whole subject of buying offshore through the net to save money.

Do you regularly buy products from overseas through the Net?

What type of things do you buy and what are the savings you enjoy?

Have you found that local suppliers are willing to come down in price if you point out to them that they're over-charging?

And, I wonder what price we'll be charged for legal music downloads when the local recording industry finally drags itself out of the iron-age and into the 21st century?

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