SHIPPING
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Thank you. The way we deal with Germany will change very soon….....
The particular guy I was talking to was Dutch, if that makes a difference.
In essence, since Brexit, we basically make no money from our direct German business, so we are working on an integrated way of making it easier for you to buy from our German retailers….We'd rather you do that and support them, than buy from us and reduce our gross margin.....
Will IH UK still be servicing all the other non-German EU countries?
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@Giles
that’s what I was afraid of .
holy shit
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will the retailers have the complete portfolio?
Besides the fact that your service is the best , I buy most of the stuff from you because you’re
the only ones selling it … -
Just after Brexit we emailed all existing EU customers telling that we would pick up the tab for any taxes, duties or fees. We repeated that mailing a few months later (at least once).
All new customers in EU, get this pop-up when they hit the site for the first time….
We'll look at making the FAQ more prominent, but honestly, I'd have found this info without too much effort and if I failed, I'd have emailed us.
We simply cant dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator…..
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will the retailers have the complete portfolio?
Besides the fact that your service is the best , I buy most of the stuff from you because you’re
the only ones selling it …We cannot influence what our retailers buy, sadly. There will be things unavailable from them, but we hope over time they can start selling more Iron Heart to fill this gap.
Ultimately, the solution that is being rolled out today (deliberately after all the launches this week..) is far from ideal, but the alternative was to stop selling to Germany all together.
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The message that should be heading to all our German customer's inboxes shortly:
Leider haben wir schlechte Nachrichten für dich den Versand nach Deutschland betreffend. Unglücklicherweise sind die Gebühren, die uns durch Versand, Zoll und Steuern deiner Bestellung entstehen und von uns bisher getragen wurden, so hoch, dass wir zukünftig anders verfahren müssen.
Selbstverständlich kannst du weiterhin bei IHUK einkaufen. Allerdings müssen wir leider eine hohe Versandgebühr erheben, um die Kosten, die uns durch Zoll und Steuern entstehen seitdem Großbritannien nicht mehr Mitglied der EU ist, decken zu können. Ab sofort wird daher für Bestellungen im Wert von und über 200,00 € eine Versandgebühr in Höhe von 75,00 € fällig, für Bestellungen im Wert von unter 200,00 € wird eine Versandgebühr von 90,00 € fällig.
Um unsere treuen deutschen Kunden dabei zu unterstützen, eine für sie kostengünstigere Alternative zu finden, haben wir auf jeder Produktseite alle Händler in Deutschland aufgelistet, von denen bei einigen ein Link angezeigt wird, der die sofortige Verfügbarkeit des Produkts anzeigt.
Wird das Wort ‘verfügbar’ angezeigt, ist mindestens eine Größe des gewünschten Produkts auf der entsprechende Seite vorrätig.
Wird das Worter ‘kein link’ angezeigt angezeigt wird, gibt es schlicht keinen Link, das Produkt kann dort aber nichts desto trotz vorrätig sein, du solltest also deren Website besuchen oder dort anrufen, um sicher zu gehen
Bitte kaufe vor Ort ein, wann immer es dir möglich ist und unterstütze das großartige Netz deutscher Händler, welches wir in den letzten Jahren aufgebaut haben.
The Iron Heart Crew
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Is only Germany affected by this? Why?
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Yea, this is definitely not cool.
Why not just ship the product to Germany and let the customer take care of the import fee, just like you do with every other non-EU country?
And what's to stop German customers from sending things to friends in neighbouring countries with free shipping and customs paid by IHUK, and then paying their friend 20 Euros to ship it to them in Germany?
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Why not just ship the product to Germany and let the customer take care of the import fee
If people contact us to request this, it is absolutely something we can do. We needed to draw a line somewhere and set a policy that was easy to enforce. In our experience of paying these taxes, duty/tax/other fees on a pair of jeans shipped to Germany adds up to a total of more than €75.
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Further to this, the cost to us if we ship something DAP, then the customer refuses delivery once they receive a bill from UPS creates a huge problem both logistically and financially for us.
We have had situations when shipping retailer orders to the EU where a typo was made on the commercial invoice, and the retailer in question was asked for thousands in duty and taxes rather than hundreds. He refused the delivery and it took us about 6 weeks of back and forth to get the goods back to us without us having to pay the discharged duty, even though the package was not delivered
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This is really sad news. Understandable from your side, but not a satisfactory solution from customer perspective.
Despite the 'great network of german retailers' (and them having really cool shops), they are far from offering the full range of IH product, some are not even present with an online shop.
As it seems to be as you say @Alex , it is still hard to understand why this only applies to one of so many EU countries and that no other solution was available.
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@endo we really do understand your point of view. I am so sorry that we have had to do this.
Since January 2020 we have had ebbs and flows of thoughts on what we should do. At one point, Giles & Paula wanted to stop servicing the EU altogether due to the additional costs we shouldered.
We tried shipping via the Netherlands to avoid the taxes for EU customers, we have tried a lot, and we have been utterly transparent throughout the process.
I am afraid that the German customs department have a different set of charges to the other and we are doing what we can to still service this market in one sense. We will constantly review the shipping charges, and adjust them as needed.
Germany is our largest European market, this has not been an easy decision for us in the slightest
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@thomas01:
I it as a bitter pill. But I think it’s fair.
If you ever been in a German Tax office it is better to pay 75€ for shipping etc .
And you could use the stacking option to minimize costs a bit.Thanks, @thomas01 and exactly that on shipping
Again, I want to point out that we will constantly review the shipping charge. We are not using this as some way to over inflate our margins
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I know you're doing what you can and this must have been a very hard decision for IHUK. Still, mainly sad. I very much hope this will prompt german retailers to ordering more products from you, so we can get them from them. Frankly speaking, ordering a shirt for 250-300€ plus 75€ for shipping seems inadequate even if it's Ironheart.
