Setting a minimum price for on-line sales would be critical to making it work. But assuming it allowed enough margin for local low volume dealers to survive, it would work fine and the same price on-line or local would give the advantage to the local shop and it's greater level of service and lack of shipping costs to local customers and still allow phone/internet sales by both on-line and local dealers to people who are not near a scubapro dealer.
Changes like that would probably not please some local scubapro dealers, but it would allow them to compete and would be far better than the current systme with it's largely uncontrolled internet sales.
With regard to the impact on smaller dealers, part of the problem now is the different Scubapro dealership levels and the lower dealer costs given to large volume dealers. That needs to be addressed now and would also need to be addressed if on-line sales were allowed as it would prevent large on-line dealers from always having a few to several percent advantage in profit margin over local dealers who are already at a disadvantage in localities where they have to pay sales tax on local sales that are not also charged for internet sales. Add a few percent higher dealer cost paid by the low volume LDS to the 4% to 7% sales tax local shops often have to pay and you place the local dealer at a significant disadvantage even at the same selling price.
It's ironic that Scubapro is itself creating the incentive for small dealers to buy more than they can sell locally to improve their order numbers in order to qualify for higher dealership levels and lower dealer costs. You can bet the excess merchandise purchased ends up on the grey market as the smaller shop cannot afford to just sit on it.
My understanding is this year they moved the required sales numbers up and basically eliminated a middle dealership level which again provides even more incnetive for smaller shops to purchase excess merchandise and sell it to grey market retailers.
It's frustrating that the company's policies and stated objectives are such a mass of contradictions. You would think someone there could look at things from a systems perspective and understand the real impact these policies have. It's also a bit insulting that SP apparently thinks their dealers are too stupid to figure out how it really works.