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No idea if this would work, though if it did it could potentially save some of you guys a small fortune.

The Royal Mail offer a redirection service, prices starting at £47 for the year (that's letter post though). So I'm thinking you set up a mail forwarder from a UK address (hopefully you know someone in the UK) to your address in Oz or wherever. Place your order with GW / Wayland / whoever, have them ship it to your UK address, and the Royal Mail then redirects it to you overseas.

As far as the suppliers are aware, you're a UK based customer and they're not breaking the rules that GW imposes on them.

Here's the URL for the redirect service, I've not looked too far in to it as I'm pretty busy though wanted to put this out there before I forgot

https://www.royalmail.com/delivery/inbound-mail/redirections

It would, but you couldn't use a home address. Not sure if PO Boxes are available, but if they are, they might be a way to do it.

It would actually cost £210.00*, but it would work until GW figured it out.

Yeah man they do PO boxes too. Must live or work at a permanent UK address though.

http://www.royalmail.com/delivery/inbound-mail/po-box?campaignid=pobox_redirect

You're looking at over £200 then though, however that could still save the extreme spenders a pretty penny

Can i just clarify. That £210, that is a yearly price? So if you wanted to send say 10 parcels to Aus (normally £25 a parcel) it would be cheaper to do it this way?

Not 100% on that, as there would likely be additional fees for sending parcels. I think the price that was quoted above is for standard letters, so you can expect it to be more expensive.

However if you cater for the savings that you Aussies would see on the products, and the shipping costs, then it could potentially work out quite well for you.

An enterprising individual would want to set up a business address in the UK so that it is legitimately theirs, which people could then use to arrange parcels through.

So if this business set themselves up a website on which Aussies could buy a tactical squad at, say, £30 (normally about £40 on todays exchange rate) and charged a tenner for shipping, that person could be saving £10 to £15? Ish?

This is all top of my head stuff, you'll want to look in to the nitty gritty, though if anyone happens to have a mate in Great Shitain that doesn't mind them using their address as forwarder then that wouldn't be an issue, you wouldn't need the PO box.

Other considerations to be made would be import taxes and the potential cost for shipping large orders if this were done as a business, as it could be a real pain in the ass to work on a larger scale.

For the individual though I imagine that the savings you could make would be impressive to say the least. Imagine being able to buy at GW list price over here again, that's practically half price! Then think about Wayland etc and the extra savings to be had through them, it could really cut costs for people over there.

One last thing to check out would be order tracking, not sure how that would work, as the company you buy from would only track it in the UK, it wouldn't work for orders being sent overseas, so there may be a bit of a gamble to be had.

Hope I'm not breaking any Dakka rules in suggesting this? I wouldn't want to land the forum in the gak for discovering something that could piss GW off?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 CageUF wrote:
It would actually cost £210.00*, but it would work until GW figured it out.

The only thing GW could do to stop this would be to ensure that their retailers dont ship to po boxes. Otherwise they'd be banning them from shipping to peoples home addresses, and I dont tihkn even GW would make that decision

Really - HOW is that *ever* going to be cheaper than just getting some internet acquaintance to order and re-ship for you? There'd be plenty of reputable folk who'd do that for a minimal fee, I'm sure :S

Why are people outside of the UK still trying to buy from the UK?

Find a US based webstore and buy them them. You're still getting big savings, just not quite as big as from the UK. But better than if you paid all that to set up a forwarder.

I never thought I'd see the day where people would set up fronts to get GW products.

Or just order from one of the many US discounters.

Problem solved.

Or just stop buying GW products.

It isn't like the company is doing its customers any favors if they are incentivised to come up with mail forwarding schemes to get products at a reasonable price.

I will again echo the mantra "vote with your wallet." Wargaming is a vast, beautiful, competitive marketplace that offers consumers a world of choices.

I think GW makes good quality products and fun games (although that Hobbit mess is disturbing). I do not buy GW products because I do not agree with the way that the company treats its customers and the wider industry. If you buy the products, the company has little incentive to change its policies.

Or just buy Chinese recasts. They want to hide behind a bunch of restrictions and BS to hose you? Buy from a country where IP rights arent recognized.

I don't buy much GW anymore these days, but when I do, I get it from US web sources.

Fair cop, I didn't know that was an option. How is it that GW can limit their UK retailers and not their US ones? Is it down to them being a UK company and not having any say on a US company runs its business?

weeble1000 wrote:
Or just stop buying GW products.

"Don't buy GW products" is not a valid answer to "What's the best way to buy GW products".

As a recent UK resident moved back to Oz, with the above redirection service in place, I can tell you it doesn't work like you think it might. Royal Mail isn't stupid - it would cost them a fortune to forward on packages overseas for a year, not to mention any customs/import/export issues - they just don't do it. No parcels and no packages. Even one of my White Dwarfs didn't make it.

 kitch102 wrote:
Fair cop, I didn't know that was an option. How is it that GW can limit their UK retailers and not their US ones? Is it down to them being a UK company and not having any say on a US company runs its business?

I think when it was discussed back when the European distributor rules came in it was decided that implementing a similar rule in the US would be against US trade laws.


This is a large part of what is so frustrating about GW... They seem to be completely incapable of grasping the world-wide nature of the internet.

'Hey, we'll stop US customers from buying online from anyone but GW by not allowing US stores to have webcarts!'... er... ok... What about the rest of the internet? Or those stores who don't buy their product directly from GW US? Or eBay?

'Hey, we'll stop southern hemisphere customers from getting cheaper prices by limiting European stores to only selling within their own regions! Genius!'... and, so, again... What about the rest of the internet?'

These are policies that are just so incredibly and obviously ridiculous that as crazy as it is it is really difficult to see how they could be anything other than some bizarre attempt to piss off their customer base, because the mind just refuses to grasp how anyone sitting in a board meeting could have actually thought that they would achieve anything at all productive.