fontgoods.com – piracy or reseller?

Michael Rafailyk

Hello everyone! Just found this resource that contains many well known fonts tagged from MyFonts. But the download links do not lead to the MyFonts website, and registration is required instead.
Does anyone know if this is a pirate resource or a reseller?

Ruixi Zhang

According to the website, they seem to operate as a purchasing agent for people whose first language is not English and who may have difficulties purchasing e-products overseas. They appear to charge an agent fee of (a whopping) 33% of the retail price, but claim to take care of exchange rates, taxes, import tariffs, etc. I also suspect that they have a much better deal with banks than individuals, in terms of foreign currency transactions. In my opinion, this resembles designer purchasing licenses on behave of clients (minus the design and plus the agent fee).

Adam Ladd

Ran into this recently too. Not for certain the legitimacy or not, but the About page says this for perhaps more context (translated from Google):

https://www.fontgoods.com/about_us/

Zigu.com operated by Beijing Zigu Technology Co., Ltd. is a commercial authorized website of genuine fonts. At present, it has obtained the Chinese mainland or global agency rights for a number of font brands, including: Aa Font Library, Zihun, Zimo Font, Huati Font, Siyu Font, Ma Ke Font, Ziyu Font, Qingke Font, Chanyu Font , Handan Font Library, Li Xuke Font, HyFont, Font.Gold, Font.Cafe, and provide MyFonts, Fonts.com, Fontspring, FontHaus, Font Bundles, Creative Market, Creative Fabrica, Type Network and other website platform font commercial authorization purchasing services.

Michael Rafailyk

@Adam Ladd and @Ruixi Zhang thanks for shadding light on this.

I suppose, in the reports, the designer sees the license sale as a sale on MyFonts / Fontspring, etc., even if it sold on a reseller-reseller platform.

Rob Barba

Well, if it's piracy, it's probably in the case of the 33% upcharge.   But it looks like it's a legitimate business otherwise.

JoyceKetterer

@Rob Barba If they are clearly calling the charge a handling fee they might be fine.  But I'm not sure if that works for a percentage fee.  

Rob Barba

JoyceKetterer said:

@Rob Barba If they are clearly calling the charge a handling fee they might be fine.  But I'm not sure if that works for a percentage fee.  

I was making a bit of a joke about the somewhat (to me, at least) usurious upcharge regardless of what they call it.  But yes, I do agree that the percentage fee is definitely out of line with norms.

JoyceKetterer

@Rob Barba I don't think this applies in this case, but there really are a lot of larger companies with weird accounting rules around vendors.  They don't understand fonts aren't paperclips and they will reject "a new font vendor" because "we already have one".  The solution to this problem is resellers, and this is the only reason why we will permit a reseller to make a purchase on our website.  They will often write us asking for the resellers' discount, to which we always reply that there isn't one but they are free to charge a handling fee so long as it is separately itemised.