2021 Price Adjustments

As we draw near the close of this eventful year, all of us at Apos have been looking back at the milestones we’ve crossed for 2020, and it truly is incredible to recall how much we’ve gone through. We’re all well aware of the pain, anxiety, and fear that this year has brought to everyone, but we’ve also experienced courage, tenacity, and gratitude. Optimism has also been a constant for us, since we made certain decisions that hurt our bottom line. Those decisions were made with the conviction that if we do right by our customers, we will foster better relationships with the audiophile community, who will in turn come back to do business with us. We are so grateful for your support, and because of all of you, our customers, we’ve been able to weather the brutal storms of 2020 — as a small startup founded just last year — and continue to do business. Thank you so much for your support and continued business! 

Many of the difficulties we faced this year were due to the pandemic and the shocks they caused to numerous aspects of our business cycle and overhead, to say nothing of our would-be customers who clamped down on spending. As a result, Apos decided to absorb the increased costs brought on by these unprecedented circumstances, but not to pass those costs onto you as our customers. We projected that the market would adjust to the new realities we all found ourselves in, the fluctuations to our costs would eventually settle, and we could get back to a more normal pace of business albeit at a higher cost. Many of the vendors we work with, who are also small and medium sized businesses, also faced difficulties, but we partnered together to fill in the gaps in our supply-and-demand cycle to keep things going.

Unfortunately, as the year went on our costs did not reach equilibrium, but only went up. What were temporary pandemic spikes in the cost-of-doing business are now set into the costs we’re seeing for next year, too. Namely, we’ve seen shipping and logistics costs increase well above the normal rate month-over-month since March, we’ve had to deal with increased tariffs and customs delays, and the US dollar has been greatly devalued compared to other currencies, making things more expensive for us. 

We reassessed the situation, worked with our vendors and business partners, and again we decided to absorb those costs entirely on our own without passing anything onto you. In many cases, this didn’t simply mean we were taking smaller margins, but were actually losing money on a considerable amount of sales. We made the decision to lose some money in order to maintain our excellent levels of customer service and to build a reputation of trust with the audiophile community.

However, after a year of ever increasing costs and forecasting what our costs will be like next year, we have decided that we will be adjusting prices for some SMSL, TOPPING, Matrix, and xDuoo products. This is a decision we did not make lightly and the adjustments we’ve made are as small as possible to ensure that Apos still has the lowest prices you will find. The price changes will take effect on January 1, 2021.

We are proud of how we handled a turbulent year as a small startup, and we stand by our decision to take on all of the market’s costs for as long as we did, but there was no viable path forward for us to continue doing so in 2021. This really was a hard decision for us to make, but ultimately one that we needed to make in order to stay in business. Last year, we began our business as a newly founded startup that wanted to further unlock the audiophile market by selling stellar brands at affordable prices, all with sterling service that you’d expect from an enthusiast driven enterprise. With these modest price adjustments, we will be able to keep bringing you the latest products from the best audio brands from all across the world, with exceptional Apos service that you know you can count on.

We again thank you for your continued support and mean it when we say that we couldn’t do this without you. We understand some of you may have questions or concerns, so as always, know we are open to hearing from you and have a dedicated Support Team that responds to each and every one of you. Please begin a live chat with us online or you may email us at “support@apos.audio” and we will respond as soon as we can.