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Given my new found sense of avarice, I am currently mildly contemplating the feasibility of running my own GW oriented Mail Order Website, to run alongside my Taxi Driving job.

I'm looking for some kind of advice as to setup costs, projected turnover for the first year, profit margins, reccomended stock levels etc.

Theory is that if I can keep my costs low enough I can offer a healthy discount as it is not my sole source of income. All depends of course.

That sounds awfully complicated Mad Doc.

Considering the changes in GW's internet retail system you may find yourself in drowning in a mountain of work to keep afloat. If anything you would have to invest around 15k$ to turn some solid discounts into a bit of profit.

If you are doing it for free I tip my hat and give you a very strange look... with the googly eyes.

I would like to see how this could work though, I am not sure how you would go about getting the information. Starting with a call to GW, or an e-mail (which might be better) you could ask a few general questions and try to get some information mailed to you. They have a very strange system that is set up to benefit them (very odd of a corporation to do that ) and keep their overhead from eating them alive. You on the other hand could work with little to no overhead, and in the long run would be competing with the FLGS quite frankly. Spend a bit of time talking to your FLGS about how they might feel about you doing this, remember to mention that you are trying to go international (I think) therefore you are not directly competing with them. Who knows you could even start a business with a FLGS which would save you a huge-headache I am sure.

We have no FLGS here. Nearest one is in East Grinstead, and to be honest having stuck my head in there, they don't have much of an inventory.

I was expecting to need £12,000 for setup costs. Main concern at the moment is where I would run the beast from. Whilst I might well be able to use a reinforced shed for stock holding, it's far from ideal! However we are in a recession, so I should be able to find somewhere sanely priced to work from.

International is the plan. I see that a certain website offers a smallish discount which, when taking into account their International Shipping and the vagaries of exchange rates are very popular.

I have few doubts I could make this work, and I fully expect to make no profit for the first couple of years (unless I get seriously lucky). It's whether or not I'll be able to get orders out on time every time that could stuff me over. No point offering a decent wedge discount if I can't deliver top notch service!

I'd seriously forget it MDG. My mate and his brother run a web based independant reseller, MCS Miniatures, and they've just stopped selling GW stuff due to the change in discount bands and GW being a real arse to deal with.

No real loss to them as they only did it as a favour for their customers, and they sell more of the other systems than they did of the GW stuff. Quite funny really the GW monkey at head office couldn't get his head around this fact and that it wasn't great loss to them to stop selling it.

Set up costs for the website vary. I set up their web site using an off the shelf ecommerce package that cost about £100 and setting it all up cost them about £500. This is cheap as I use it as a way to promote myself as well, so happy to do it as a favour. The real time eater is adding all the stock, you really need to include two size's of stock photo, add a description (usually short & long), pricing, p&p and select the correct category when adding it to the database, oh and set up the categories in the first place. I did chase up the designer of one of the online stores asking for a quote on a similar set up and I was quoted around £6000 and I bet that didn't include adding the stock as it really is time consuming.

I have heard many "inferences" to put it lightly about how hard it is to manage an account with GW on a small buck.

GW likes to move product in consistently massive quantities to multiple outlets, and from experience no corporation really cares for PR that much in reality. Making sure that THEIR customers are "happy" is their goal, and if you provide a solid outlet with consistent flow I think you could actually manage something profitable, albeit a mere 2-5% you would still have a relatively solid investment in place.

Ah, an idea ...

If you could target the products that are in demand and control the flow of your supply in order to manage a consistent margin, your business plan could work quite well. Maybe you only sell box-sets? I am not sure how GW would feel about this (hmm...) but you could be the future alternative (not your business alone of course) to distribute specialty items, possibly even FW stuff if you feel like you are just made of steel balls .

You've got the right attitude to starting up a business since the first few years will be tough and customer service is what separates the big dogs from stores no one uses. Even though Neal's thewarstore.com isn't the cheapest store around, they don't even offer free shipping, just about no one beats 'em in customer service and they can get the orders shipped out the same day you order.

Personally I'd do what you're doing now and research the numbers and crunch them to see if its worth it. Then I'd look into starting up an easy online business like through Ebay but I haven't been keeping up with GW UK's stance on that; eventually leading to your own site/store unless Ebay is profitable. Paypal could be a bonus too but then again I'm not sure how much $$$ they make off of the businesses that use 'em.

Selling bitz especially buying the AOBR and selling the units individually would be a decent start to get a taste of what it'd be like to have a full fledged store.

Ebay bad to GW... GW SMASH EBAY, BAD EBAY, SMASH!!!



"Ahem... sorry about that one..."

AND AWAY!!!