Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I used to have a few sites bookmarked that sold sprues and its from the various GW plastic kits. I haven't looked in a few months but when I went looking for arms for a squad conversion today I notice that every site is just selling complete boxes now.
Did GW decide it didn't want people buying their products, then selling them piecemeal now?

Is there anyone besides EBay that still sells just specific sprues?

As far as I know, the war store (thewarstore.com) is still selling bitz. I just got a mega-grab bag of bits of various things.

What sites were you looking at? A lot of times some sites pop up, sell for a while and then go out of business.

http://www.bitzbox.co.uk/ is very good, although it doesn't look like they have witch hunters bitz anymore.

It's not GW's doing. Selling bits is hard work, and tricky to actually make money from.

Most bits sellers just don't last very long.

One thing few people seem to think about (especially in context of GW discontinuing it's own bits service) is how much labor and intensive inventory control successfully managing a bits service requires.

Look at the Warstore, and how many different bits it offers. Think of how many different kits they need to divide up, price, keep track of inventory, as well as manage the growing pile of pieces that don't sell well (which the war store does with the grab bags). If you don't take that seriously, and let any of it get out of hand, you're going to rapidly find yourself losing money as service starts to suffer, you've got money tied up in a boxes fo partially cut-up, unsorted sprues, etc.

It might seem like easy money when you take a look at a couple of popular pieces and see them going at $10 a pop, but it's managing to get the other $20~40(however much) out of the rest of the kit so that you come out ahead that takes a lot of work.

bitzbarn.com sells bitz, sprues, sprue sets, and boxes.

Lots of people that start offering bitz assume that most of every kit will sell. In fact, a fairly high proportion of every kit is pretty undesirable. If your prices didn't reflect that then you've got a big problem once the good bitz are gone.