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I strongly suspect that the main cause of some of the inexplicable price markups are not the local retailers, but as I said, the pricing structure where a sole local distributor is appointed by the manufacturer, granted a monopoly over supply and then RRP's are set by the manufacturer or distributor that are considerably in excess of US prices.
I know when priced a Celestron scope here that retailers here were having to work on a Celestron/distributor set RRP that wasmore than 50% higher than the RRP of the exact same scope in the USA. And when you are looking at C11s and C14s that's thousands of dollars difference.
Net result was I didn't buy a Celestron scope, I bought a WO scope from Andrews Comm and most recently a Tak scope from AEC for prices that were comparable to US prices (as they should be since the product is sourced in a third country) once you took into account things like GST etc. In fact at 78 cents in the dollar conversion rate the Tak is priced slightly less than it is in the USA.
Buying a scope or mount locally even if its a bit more expensive does give you the benefit of local warranty support and repairs which can be invaluable and worth paying a bit of a premium to get. But if its something like an eyepiece or a filter, that would have to be shipped overseas back to the manufacturer for warranty work even if I bought locally and isn't a hassle to ship, then I certainly do look at US dealers and buy from them if the price difference is substantial. I'd like to patronise local if possible but sometimes the price difference is so large that I buy overseas.
That applies doubly to something like computer software where all you are getting is code on a DVD and a manual, there is no conceivable reason it should be double the price here and no reason why you wouldn't buy it from overseas for half the price.
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