Megaspin is the home of Butterfly in the US, they don't care being that much pricey, they will always sell millions of blades and rubbers because you can't buy BTY stuff from the non US retailers when you live in the US. Butterfly is also the main USATT sponsor. Paddle Palace is the distributor for all the other brands, and they work hand in hand with USATT clubs and organizations, they also organize many tournaments. We've got the same stupid sh.t in France with Wack Sport: it's not the company everyone want to buy stuff from, but guess what ? it's one of the FFTT sponsors since... well as far as I remember since always ! and all the kids know Wack Sport because their catalogue is in all the TT clubs, beautiful catalogues with nice pics, nice advertising... wew!
Its a bit more complicated than that.
Sadly, but true, each region has sales figures/targets, in return they get certain allocations of marketing/funding/sponsorship. This is common business practice in any industry, so no different in sport goods.
If I have the ability, and providing the customer service quality is decent, I would also support local distributors. Because, those local distributors will "give back" to the local TT environment.
It could be in the forms of tournaments, or pro players getting sponsored - yes, maybe many things don't come back to you as an individual, but it does help the local TT community.
Same token, you buy from overseas - you helping the other countries "local" TT community.
Of course, all distributors are different. Maybe some will indeed use those funding to do some real good, some maybe only soso, so I can't comment to say this is indeed the best, but if you do support local, you could be doing something decent locally.
You get those people that moans about everything, how there is no this or that locally. But then I ask them - do you support local stores? guess what, no.
So I ask, how do you expect local to blossom, if you are one of the reasons why they don't.
Sadly in a way, with the evolving of online stores and cross market selling, it becomes a price war and no longer about funding locally. and a lot of consumer don't care much of local tt community/beneficiary -unless it is directly or indirectly related to them. But a big portion of the consumers expect someone comes and makes things better for them
Paddle Palace - imagine if everyone don't support them and all go to European stores. and when the day PP closes down... how bad it will affect the local communities.