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I live in Denmark in Europe. I like how easy it is to updated with the latest Pathfinder product by subscribing.
But because the books is shipped from USA to Denmark I have to pay alot money in tax and toll to get it through customs. The toll and tax is 70 to 110% extra to the cost of the products.
Example: When i got my last shipment i had to pay an extra 85% in toll and tax to get it.
If there was a way to have the subscribed products shipped from within europe. That would be alot easier to get my products. And maybe it could bring the shipping time down from the 9 to 36 days.
Or maybe if i were able to pick up my book from a local gaming store. Just like if I preordered it.
I could just preorder it at the local gaming store, but I don't want to lose the subscribtion benefits.
I wouldn't mind paying a higher price for my books, as long as I could get away from the high tax and toll penalty.
Is there a business idea there?
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Unfortunately we only have our warehouse in Redmond, WA to ship subscriptions from. Our technical director Vic Wertz made an excellent post (here) explaining why we are not able to offer our subscriptions through local gaming stores.
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Sara, the problem isn't with the PDF (skimming Vic post I see him speaking of those) but the printed books.
The import taxes, for me, aren't a big problem (6% or 4%, I don't recall exactly), the problem is the repackaging and expedition fees of the books after the customs have checked them. For some reason we have to pay again the postage fee/courier costs and that has a big impact on the book costs. Sometime we avoid that whn the package is a single module or a AP, but it is applied to all hardbound book.
I have checked my costs against those of the local dealer: after all is factored in some stuff cost slightly less and some slightly more than buying from Paizo. Buy from Paizo has 2 big perks: the free PDF we get with the subscriptions and a monthly delivery against the long time before the local gaming shop get the order delivered.
Finding a way to avoid the double billings of the delivery fees 8first from Paizo then from customs) would be great, as it would cut our costs significantly.
Sadly I doubt it is possible, especially as you would have to deal with several different nations. Maybe it is possible to find a way for the whole EU.
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You are lucky Gorbacz. Here custom service see those big box, move them to a warehouse somewhere, check the invoice, tag the taxes, probably don't open them but apply again the delivery costs.
After 27 days I am still waiting for the Bestiary 3. :(
Probably it is still in some custom warehouse waiting for someone to forward it. Christmas holidays have their drawbacks.
There are good chances that the Dragon Empires Gazetteer, being in a separate package for weight reasons, will be delivered several day before the Bestiary and possibly without customs tariffs.
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Thinking back to the issues many Europeans had with the Beginners Box, it appears that duties are often charged based on the nature of the goods enclosed. Books, magazines, and other 'printed matter' seems to escape duty (at least to the UK), while anything listed as a 'game' sets off the Customs alarm bells.
Given that the definition of a 'game' often seems to arbitarily hinge on something like the inclusion of dice, pawns, tokens, etc.; would it be possible to ship such products as the Beginners Box, Kill Doctor Lucky, Stonehenge, et al, under the radar, as their component parts?
There may be duty to pay on a crate full of dice or tokens, but it would be on the dice/tokens only. The crate of rulebooks would go through duty-free, as would the boards, reference sheets, and flat-packed boxes.
The European office(s) (or friendly distributor) can then assemble the boxes, add the rules, add the contentious dice/tokens, to match the local orders, and ship them round the EU (or within their own country) duty-free.
Would that reduce import costs to the distributor? Or does that constitute some form of artificial tax evasion?
I don't mind if the local distributor charges a fee for the handling, and passes that on to the retail or home customer, if it results in a reduction of import duties and a net saving for everyone at the end of the day.
Thinking outside the box? Or crazy pipe-dream?
We have open borders within EU. Anything shipped from within EU will go allmost unnoticed. There is actually companies based on repacking boxes to get around import taxes. I thought about using a service like that. But if the golem got a solution that would be better.
Im scared to se how much extra im gonna pay for my battle case...
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This would be the relevant part:Sara, the problem isn't with the PDF (skimming Vic post I see him speaking of those) but the printed books.
The retailer would also have to have an account with us, and we'd have to verify that they're a real retailer. We'd need to design a new a system for letting them purchase subscriptions and tie them to people who may or may not already exist in our system (which also means we have to deal with potential customer privacy issues). None of these are simple things—each is way more complicated than most of you would ever suspect... but for the purposes of continuing this discussion, let's say it's all handled.
Ok, so now it comes time to ship a new subscription product. In some order, the following things have to happen: the product is paid for by the customer; the product is picked up from the retailer by the customer; the PDF is made available to the customer. There are a couple of ways to handle this, but I suspect that most retail subscribers would want to have access to the PDF at pretty much the same time as paizo.com subscribers, and that generally happens about two weeks before the retailer even has the book. That means that the first of those actions to happen would be issuing the PDF.
But wait! What if the customer never buys the book? We've already given him a free PDF. Worse yet, what if he hasn't bought a book in months, and the retailer hasn't told us? Maybe we've given him *lots* of free PDFs. Well, the way to prevent this is to ensure that payment is collected before the PDF is issued. And, due to the previously mentioned timing issue, that means that Paizo has to collect the payment—otherwise, you're waiting until someone notifies you that you need to pay the retailer, and then you have to pay, and then we have to find out that you paid, and then we can give you the PDF. (And you'll still have to visit the retailer in couple of weeks when your book shows up.) So, fine—payment will be through Paizo.
But that means that we need to pay the retailer some portion of the amount we collected. (We also have to verify that the retailer actually ordered at least one copy of the book for every subscription he has sold, which is a whole other complicated issue that we'll also assume is handled for the purposes of this discussion.) So, let's look at what a retailer typically expects, based on a normal Pathfinder Adventure Path volume (because that's the line that would probably do best for retail subscriptions).
A given AP volume has a cover price of $19.99; let's call it an even $20 for simple math. We sell to distribution at 60% off cover price, or $8. Retailers normally buy from their distributor at about 50% off cover price, so they generally pay the distributor $10, and make $10 when they sell that copy. To sum up: for a normal retail sale of an AP volume, Paizo gets $8, the distributor gets $2, and the store gets $10.
Now, paizo.com subscribers pay $13.99 (let's call it $14) for an AP volume. How shall we split that up? Remember that we make $8 on a normal retail sale, and the retailer makes $10.
If we let the retailer take the cut he's used to, that leaves us $4—half of what we would normally make for a retail sale, and that doesn't even factor in the credit card processing fee that was added to the equation. We're probably not even covering our cost-of-goods with the remaining $3-and-change.
If we instead take the $8 we normally make on retail sales—which is still $4 less than we make on a regular subscription sale—that only leaves $4 for the retailer, and that might not cover *his* expenses. And even it it does, how many retailers would think taking $4 instead of $10 is a good tradeoff?
(The answer is the ones who believe that if they don't, you'll buy from us instead, so they're really making $4 instead of $0—but those retailers probably are going to feel a bit held hostage, and so they may not be especially happy to see you every month, and they also won't be terribly happy about "having to" participate with us.)
But even if that split *were* enough to entice a few retailers into participating, does it make sense for us to do it? We've said before that subscriptions are our bread-and-butter—they ensure that month-to-month, worst case, we're still covering our operating expenses. And they do that *because* they make us a higher profit margin per sale than the same product through retailers. Basically, everybody who cancels their subscription to buy at retail reduces that margin, and we can afford for that to happen a little bit—but if it were to happen a lot, or worse yet, be *encouraged* through a retailer subscription plan, we'd be losing our safety net.
But even if we could work out the economics, the problems don't even end there.
What if the retailer for whatever reason can't provide the level of service that you should be getting? What if he doesn't even have a book for you? You paid us, so we're ultimately responsible for that—yet we have no control over it.
And this isn't even a worst-case scenario, because there's an entire part of the process I haven't even touched on yet, and it lies completely out of our control: delivery of the printed product. You've got your PDF, and a couple of weeks later, the retailer gets your copy of the book. Now, he has to let you know the book is in. (We don't have access to their inventories or their shipment manifests, so we can't tell you.) Some retailers may be organized enough to handle that flawlessly, every time. Others will not be, and it *will* generate calls to our customer service line that we can't really help with much—at least not until we're pretty sure that the retailer for whatever reason can't or won't help you, and then we'll have to solve your problem at our cost, and only after you've endured more frustration than any of us would like. By this point, everybody has lost.
And what if a particular retailer has a *lot* of problems, and it becomes clear that he just can't *handle* subscriptions, and we have to cut him off? Then we have to go to his subscribers and tell them that if they want to keep their subs, they'll need to do it completely with us, and pay for shipping, and so on... and that won't be a fun day for anyone. (Especially if said retailer then starts telling people how Paizo stole his customers.)
Thinking back to the issues many Europeans had with the Beginners Box, it appears that duties are often charged based on the nature of the goods enclosed. Books, magazines, and other 'printed matter' seems to escape duty (at least to the UK), while anything listed as a 'game' sets off the Customs alarm bells.
Given that the definition of a 'game' often seems to arbitarily hinge on something like the inclusion of dice, pawns, tokens, etc.; would it be possible to ship such products as the Beginners Box, Kill Doctor Lucky, Stonehenge, et al, under the radar, as their component parts?
There may be duty to pay on a crate full of dice or tokens, but it would be on the dice/tokens only. The crate of rulebooks would go through duty-free, as would the boards, reference sheets, and flat-packed boxes.
The European office(s) (or friendly distributor) can then assemble the boxes, add the rules, add the contentious dice/tokens, to match the local orders, and ship them round the EU (or within their own country) duty-free.
Would that reduce import costs to the distributor? Or does that constitute some form of artificial tax evasion?
I don't mind if the local distributor charges a fee for the handling, and passes that on to the retail or home customer, if it results in a reduction of import duties and a net saving for everyone at the end of the day.
Thinking outside the box? Or crazy pipe-dream?
For the UK, Books are VAT exempt - games, and other products, are not. Therefore if a shipment is over the £18 cut off value at which VAT is levied, and contains 'games' in any value it becomes subject to VAT on its full value plus handling charge as Royal mail process it.
The only ways to absolutely avoid VAT on Paizo purchases to the UK are to only purchase books - or to keep orders below the value that attracts taxes, but that simply increases postage costs instead so you don't really save anything overall.
A Paizo UK hub would be fantastic - if it worked properly and was cost effective.
But I do remember how appallingly bad the service was when Paizo last tried something similar and subcontracted TPFG to be European distributor for Dungeon and Dragon magazines. That didn't end well at all - and Paizo took all the flack from very many unhappy Europen customers with no products delivered, and took the financial hit to put it all right.
Chief Technical Officer
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A Paizo UK hub would be fantastic - if it worked properly and was cost effective.
But I do remember how appallingly bad the service was when Paizo last tried something similar and subcontracted TPFG to be European distributor for Dungeon and Dragon magazines. That didn't end well at all - and Paizo took all the flack from very many unhappy Europen customers with no products delivered, and took the financial hit to put it all right.
Yep. We're unlikely to repeat that experiment anytime soon—especially because our subscription offerings have become *vastly* more complex since then.
We understand that it often makes the most sense for international customers to purchase from retailers in their own part of the world. I would hope that if you tell your retailer you'd like "one of every X that comes out," they'd be very happy to order one for you each month, and *maybe* even happy enough to offer you some kind of discount for your regular order.
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We understand that it often makes the most sense for international customers to purchase from retailers in their own part of the world. I would hope that if you tell your retailer you'd like "one of every X that comes out," they'd be very happy to order one for you each month, and *maybe* even happy enough to offer you some kind of discount for your regular order.
I have done that for more than 20 years and it worked perfectly (dragon from n.78, Dungeon from n. 10).
Sadly in the last years the market of game materials has dwindled (probably as a consequence of the diffusion of computer games together with the changes in the boardgames production philosophy), so now the distributor I used do a big purchase every 5-6 months instead of every month like in the past.I am unwilling to wait 6-10 months for a 5% reduction in the final price of a AP when compared with a direct purchase from the Paizo store, especially as subscribing I get a free PDF.
I feel it is a bit counter productive to the diffusion of our hobby as the local stores are important for introducing new players to it, but on the other hand purchasing from Paizo is so much easier that you have become my supplier of reference for most of my RPG purchases.
I have no idea how many european subscribers there is. But i know that some of my friends will not subscribe because of the import tax.
If the group of european subsribers is large, and calculating 10%-20% gain of subscibers from the people that wont subscribe because of the import tax. I hope Paizo will reconsider making a european shipping department.