Why aftermarket parts are cheap.
 

We've all heard the old adage of pick three.

Speed, quality, price.

You can get a low price with low quality, or long lead times.
You can get high quality with a high price, or long lead times.
Etc
Etc.

There is a fourth factor that a lot of people don't consider and that kind of goes hand in hand with price. Labor.

Who makes your parts will often determine how much they cost. I bring this up because a recent flurry of parts for the Twins are showing up on the market for rather cheap prices. 2/3, sometimes 1/2 of the cost of the big name guys. Results are similar, build quality is OK to good, and everything seems to check out.

In one recent thread I saw someone ask "How can you make this so cheap?". The short answer is that they are paying very little for labor, likely at a business that has little safety concerns for it's workers. Some of the money you spend stays in the US, but a lot of it goes into the pockets of the factory owner in that other country.

If you decide to save up a little bit more you can not only buy a (likely) higher quality product, but you can spend your money here in the US, supporting US jobs, and ensuring that a small business here in the US continues to provide us with all of the engineering, front end work, testing, and troubleshooting that many other companies just copy directly.

This isn't a Fake vs. Real argument, although some of the points are the same. This is about supporting the US companies that were the ones that did all the ground work, pay their employees a living wage, respond to us directly on the website, and in general kick a whole lot of ass.

In the end the choice is yours, but think about this for a while before you pull the trigger on something just because it's cheap and you don't have to wait an extra month or two to get it.

Calculating cost can go several different directions, and the more time you spend on a single product the more costly it becomes.

Only a very few companies that build aftermarket parts put in months of planning, design, and engineering before a prototype comes out, and that cost reflects the total volume of units being made, + manufacturing costs + profit margins.

I myself started designing parts via solidworks/autocad and can build costly parts or cheap parts based on how much time i put on it and its complexity during its manufacturing processes. I can pump out cheap 3d printed prototypes made of polymer, or pump out expensive CNC prototypes cut from a block of aluminum.

It all depends on the preferences of each individual company. Some products require lots of attention as they are vital components to make things work, and some products can be half-assed in the designing phase because it makes no difference in 1 hour or 10 hours spent on the same render.

^ True. But a lot of the cost in the US parts is the development, testing, troubleshooting (where applicable) and then labor once the parts are being made.

If you are just copying a design that someone else made your engineering time will be significantly lower, and then if you are using lower quality materials and lower cost labor obviously you're going to end up with a cheaper part.

Those companies in SE Asia rarely, if ever, put in the front end engineering to develop the parts they produce.

I guess I should have been a bit clearer because mainly this topic is surrounding the exhaust systems that are showing up on the market now that were a year into aftermarket production.

Awesome post.


If I may, I think I have a 5th thing to add. Customer Service. I think customer service is another thing that gets calculated into cost, that's at least how I look at it when I buy something.

I'll use FT86Speedfactory for example. They generally provide great prices but in some situations it's not the case. At the same time, I'd be content with paying the extra 10% for big ticket items (say headers or an exhaust) from this company because I've dealt with them before (experience/reputation) and I know before when I had a problem, they fixed it at no cost to me. So if I'm spending $50 more for the header from them (made up value, made up item), I can bite the cost if I know that the cheaper vendor is someone I have no experience with and may provide questionable if any customer service should I have an issue with the header, thus leaving me with an awkwardly shaped paper weight and down several hundred dollars.

For this reason, I won't buy from a company that doesn't display their phone number or makes their phones number hard to find on their website. That's a bit sketchy. Sure it's old school to place phone orders but when I need customer service, it's a different story. And that's the other aspect to OP's statement about "labor" being added into the cost. How much time of the vendor's day will they bother "wasting" to address my concerns? Time is money after all....


As I always say when buying anything, sometimes it's cheaper to spend more money.

Necro bump but there's a thin line with what's considered as a US company. A lot of Japanese companies have opened up shop in the US and actually do R&D, customer service, etc all here in the US. Not to mention most of the time the majority of the people employed are American.

Good example could be Greddy and HKS when HKS was around at least

In some ways I still think your 4th point goes hand and hand with cost. Ex: it's expected you'll get good customer service, labor, R&D with a costly part but compared to a cheap knockoff probably won't come with those services

I think the "living wages" argument is bunk.
We need to realize that just because a "living wage" in North America is over $40k annually, doesn't mean that it is the same all over the world.

If the guy in Vietnam making $30USD per month can deliver a superior (or even just similar) product to the guy making $30USD per hour, buying the less expensive product doesn't make you evil - it just means you're making use of the benefits of the global economy.

That being said, piracy or intellectual property theft is something else entirely