"Questionable billing practices by FOUNDRY" Topic

Except we are not getting a great deal in the UK. I nearly took advantage of their 20% sale to buy 3 packs of wild west as that put them back on par with ARTIZAN. I then found I would be charged £8.00 GBP postage. (Fixed fee unless you pay £70.00 GBP where its free) No, its not negotiable. It would not cost Foundry 8 quid to box 3 blistas & mail them from Nottingham to Leicester.

Incidentally… at 10% P+P that would be an order of £80.00 GBP and at 15% thats an order of c.£53. It seems they don't want small orders tho' how that makes economic sense baffles me. Either they are supported by a minority of rich collectors or B. ansell is still subsidising them, mind you none of my business because I won't buy of 'em.

They long ago decided that they're not interested in small orders – actually as a basic concept that can make good sense (since an order for one pack takes almost as much time and effort to log, pack and despatch as one for 10 packs) but their benchmark for what constitutes a "small" order, ie. up to seventy quid, is a bleeding high one. (My one figure order last year only happened because they had a book I was after too, and orders with books are post free – no way I'd have paid £8.00 GBP post for 24 figures….)

Dom.

Maybe, but its taken nothing like as long to cast, which is the time consuming bit!!!

You have to either pity or envy the company who are too busy to take money off customers, there's no middle ground!

The other issue is many of their 25mm products are skirmish ranges. Maybe they should sell 'em on as they'll only tend to attract small orders?

Keeping quiet and just moving on as you put it is much less effective than making a big noise and maybe encouraging others to think twice about ordering from Foundry. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that!

So whether some people here are deluded or not isn't really important and I don't know why you feel it is so important to keep saying what Foundry is doing is legal, who cares if it is legal, who cares if iTunes do the same thing, what Foundry are doing is unfair and a ripoff legal or not, and the more noise and the more people who pay attention and maybe realise that they are not alone in thinking the same well, all the better.

Will this have an impact on Foundry today, no of course not, but over time if more and more people feel the same it will eventually have some impact or maybe it just serves to discourage other manufacturers from adopting similar practices, if that is all it achives that is worthwhile as well.

So although I didn't start this or other related topics I encourage them and others to voice their opinions and not just quietly shuffle off as some seem to want.

Mind you if I was in the UK and seeing that all its overseas customer were subsidising my purchases of minis then I guess I would be beating a drum loudly in defence of Foundry as well.

Oh and BTW.
"Heavy minis" costing more to ship isn't an excuse they can use either since they state on their site that shipping is free. You can't say shipping is free but the product cost more to cover shipping, if they did that, well it just might be illegal under UK law, certainly would be a false or misleading claim.

I have no problem with companies that have minimum order levels or nuisance value charges like this.

It seems fair to me, order processing has a fixed cost and small orders are a pain in any business, its logical and fair, if I can help out a company by placing one larger order I will always do so, hoping in return they help me out by keeping prices down when they can etc.

Just make a bulk order and GBP70 is not a lot of money these days, especially with Foundry it hard not to spend over GBP70. Even get together with friends to place an order, something our club does from time to time with some companies.

I much prefer that to say the Perrys who want to charge me 18% even if I order GBP500+ worth of goods, or FrontRank who want to charge me 30% even if I order GBP1000+, and thats on top of the extra 15% profit they make on non-EU orders.

I don't know why you feel it is so important to keep saying what Foundry is doing is legal

Maybe because of the poster asking if there was a government authority he could complain to, who clearly seemed to think it was illegal…? You seem to like picking my points as "irrelevant" when they're directly responding to comments others have made….

Dom, abandoning thread….

PS – Quick quotes from Front Rank's shipping page as you seem keen to start villifying them now as well:

"15% OFF figurines valued £300.00 GBP and over."

"For overseas orders over £300.00 GBP we will either refund your card or issue a credit note to refund the difference between the actual postage cost and the % paid for p&p."

Oh, and on the VAT thing, if a company doesn't reduce the price on non-EC orders, that doesn't go into their pocket, but has to be paid to HMRC. (Effectively it remains VATable turnover unless you actually go through the paperwork to deduct it.)

"h, and on the VAT thing, if a company doesn't reduce the price on non-EC orders, that doesn't go into their pocket."

I still dont agree with you on this point.

If they sell a product to you as GBP10 inclusive of VAT and they sell it to me as GBP10 exclusive of VAT (which is zero rated) then how do the need to pay HMRC anything……

Exports outside the EC aren't automatically zero-rated; they're *only* zero rated if you're willing to jump through the necessary hoops to have the VAT deducted. (To be honest on postal exports this shouldn't be overly problematic, but some firms view it as too much hassle; their call.) They're not selling it to you as £10.00 GBP with no VAT, but as £10.00 GBP including VAT – the VAT only comes off with the relevant paperwork to deduct it. (This is a point that I certainly didn't understand myself in the past, so quite possibly contradicts things I've said in the past before I spent some fairly serious time reading the deeply interesting HMRC rules….)

The real stinker is if the company's on a flat rate VAT scheme, though – there they pay the VAT man a fixed percentage of their entire VATable turnover, rather than individually logging input and output VAT, which reduces the paperwork burden on small businesses, but has some down-sides, one of which is *very* relevant here. "VATable turnover" includes exports outside of the EC – the latter are "VATable at 0%" rather than exempt, so actually *can't* be deducted if you're on a flat rate VAT scheme, since the trader has to still pay the VAT man his cut on that turnover, even though it would be 0% VAT on the "input-output" calculation….

(As an aside, if I ever reach the stage of being big enough to have to VAT-register (unlikely, fortunately), this is very likely the position I'd find myself in, as pretty much all of the lines I retail are from firms not VAT-registered, which'd leave me taking a massive financial kicking on the "input-output" VAT method.)

Dom.

PS – All of the above is my best understanding, but is based on a fair bit of research and a couple of phone calls to HMRC when I started seriously looking at the possibility of one day having to VAT register myself. The flat rate scheme stuff is a real stinker, in particular, but I'm pretty sure it's right. Predictably enough I'd consult with a tax accountant before making any major business decisions based on it, though.

"villifying"
wow….. thats a bit extreme…

Maybe – let's say this thread rapidly took on a flaming torches and pitchforks kind of vibe, so I went with the rhetoric….

Watch out!, he's got a rethoric and it's loaded!.

I've got a loaded rhetoric, but am I willing to shoot?