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Because not everyone is into recasts, and lining the pockets of people that put no effort into it?

 techsoldaten wrote:
The cost increases by 50% annually? Or you just pay 50% more than the United States?

I used employ a number of Australians and became well acquainted with the import taxes. Sending a laptop from here to there cost me over $1,000 just in fees for commercial goods.

Ah let me elaborate. The prices don’t go up annually or anything, by average I meant average across the product range. If something costs £100, it would be about AU$181.81. FW would round that up to say AU$190.00 as a round figure. A different product costing £50 (AU$90.90) they might round to AU$100.00. The ‘round-up’ factor varies from product to product, so when I say the average cost increase I mean the average ‘round-up’ factor across their entire product range.

When this all happened someone catalogued every single one of FW’s products in a number of currencies. From that we could calculate the average round-up factor. One might expect say 5% or perhaps 10% round-up to give FW some breathing space to account for exchange rate fluctuations. Instead the round-up factor was 41%. We then realised that the quoted £ prices include VAT, which should be applied to sales in the UK but not outside of it, so you need to remove that. The Australian equivalent, GST, is 10% compared to the VAT of 20%. So that meant we were paying 10% too much on top of the markup, for a final round-up factor of 50%.

Hence the uproar - Australians are paying 50% more for the exact same product and service as people in the UK. The numbers were even worse for New Zealand.

You mention import taxes and yes they apply if you are bringing in goods to Australia for commercial use, but for a private import for personal use (ie online shopping from overseas) you don’t have to pay it until you go above about US$700. It’s also the customer’s responsibility, not the vendor’s - so even if FW try to say ‘it’s to cover import taxes’, it’s not - as a customer you still have to pay import taxes if you go over the threshold.

In short, it’s horse and FW are a pack of -word beginning with C that Australians use a lot and is considered very offensive in the US-s.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Because not everyone is into recasts, and lining the pockets of people that put no effort into it?

Also be wary of recasts as not all are proper 1:1 ratios of the real model.

Friend of mine bought a Leviathan Dread from a Russian recaster and when it arrived it was a full head shorter than the proper FW version - looked very out of place next to the rest of the army