@frontloaderfan
There's a difference though. Miele will charge you a similar price for a washer here in the EU too. They're extremely expensive and high quality machines.
Mercedes likewise are extremely expensive compared to other car brands in Germany or anywhere where in Europe or in the US, but you are really getting what you pay for in most cases.
Persil however, is a similar product to Tide or any other TOL detergent and priced similarly in its home markets. It would be like me paying 250%+ the price for a jug of Tide imported specially from the US to Ireland when it's pretty much identical performing to Ariel and Persil and a few others here.
OK, I can see some people would see a novelty value in that, but it's not really like you're getting some kind of a vastly superior product, which you possibly are with Miele and Mercedes and other very high end brands.
Some US brands have that kind of reputation too, I mean Speedqueen front loaders aren't exactly cheap anywhere.
I'm just not convinced that people really get much benefit other than psychologically to importing foreign detergents to be perfectly honest.
You're paying a lot more largely because of shipping costs associated with bulky items like detergents that are normally shipped via bulk commodity logistics through the retail system, not by mail order.
Also, post 9/11 it's getting very difficult to ship any kind of chemicals (particularly liquids) without all sorts of fuss if it has to go by air. So, simply buying from a German site might not be too practical.
