laguitarsales.com

What It Is

LA Guitar Sales is a niche premium guitar e-commerce retailer originally founded in Los Angeles, USA, with over 20 years of operation. It has a physical offline showroom, which relocated to the Big Bear Lake area of California in 2024. It focuses on selling new and pre-owned acoustic guitars, and also offers custom guitar building, guitar consignment, and accessory services. It is a well-known professional instrument retailer in North American guitar collecting circles.

Core Offerings & Pricing

The website's core business covers four main areas:

1. Branded guitar sales: It carries thousands of models from nearly 50 brands including Martin, Taylor, Eastman, with clear separation between new and pre-owned inventory. It supports filtering by brand and price range.
2. Custom guitar services: Leveraging the team's decades of custom building experience, it can help customers create one-of-a-kind custom instruments.
3. Consignment services: It charges a fixed 20% commission with no hidden extra fees passed to sellers, and locks in sellers' earnings upfront.
4. Related accessory and instrument sales: It stocks accessories including strings, cases, capos and more, and also sells other stringed instruments like banjos and ukuleles.

Pricing is exactly as marked on the product page. Accessories start as low as tens of dollars, while high-end custom builds and collector-grade pre-owned guitars can reach tens of thousands of dollars. Layaway pre-order is available, and you can reserve an instrument with a minimum 20% deposit.

Pros & Cons

Pros: The platform has focused exclusively on the guitar space for 20 years, with legitimate and consistent inventory. Local customers can visit its climate-controlled showroom to test instruments in person. All regularly stocked guitars come with a 72-hour trial period, there are no storage fees, all policies are clear and transparent, and the consignment terms are very seller-friendly.
Cons: The website interface is outdated, there is no Chinese language support, international purchases do not qualify for returns or exchanges, and there is no direct shipping to China, which makes it very unfriendly for Chinese-based buyers.

Who It's For & Access From China

The website is currently directly accessible without any VPN or workaround. It is great for guitar enthusiasts, collectors, and professional players based overseas looking to purchase instruments. If domestic Chinese users want to buy from it, they will need to arrange for a third-party freight forwarder and handle customs clearance on their own, which carries relatively high after-sales risk. We recommend buying through authorized domestic dealers instead.