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Howard
It's hard to get a straight answer from our distributors even the ones I get on with
From what I've garnered, distro's did really well out of selling to Wiggle/CRC etc, until they got so big they turned around to them and started demanding prices to cheap for them to make a decent profit on, and the heavy discounting is now hurting the perception of those brands (i.e your not a 'premium brand' anymore if you are constantly 40% off online) so we've seen a few brands start to slip away from the big online boys, and keep specific products for physical shops and not sell them to online
Also one thing to note is the reason you can get Shimano stuff so heavily discounted is not the fault of the UK distributors, it's grey market stuff. - A bike brand will do a deal with Shimano and buy say 10,000 Ultegra group sets to put on bikes, then only end up needing 9000, so a thousand will then get sold on cheap and they end up entering the UK market, which will then effects the profitability of shops that sell those bike brands, because the can't sell Shimano stuff at a profit anymore, losing a big chunk of income!