Pizarro miniatures

[Ritual]

Originally posted by gary
Ok this could drag on forever. I have allready said I don\'t know for sure if el greco got £ or euro, the thing you don\'t seem to see in my posts is that they aren\'t using the website currency converter the, dick turpin model i asked them about is at a different price then the converter would have it at.
If a company is small or big they want to make profits we can all agree on that. If they paid the euro price of 40 euros how can they then sell it for £34 which would equal 36.47 odd euros, by your way they would barely make any profit at all evan if they got a bulk discount.

Better exchange rate when they did the deal, perhaps?

But, yeah, let\'s end this... My point was don\'t accuse a company for ripping you off when you don\'t have the facts. And don\'t criticise a company for things they have no control over (postage rates). I\'ve made my point and that\'s that.

I hope you get the mini in question, and I hope Pizarro sort out their website.

 

[gary]

Well thanks for your point ritual it has inspired me to email el greco to find out the facts about the products they sell from pizarro, and I also wish to ask them why they use the out of date 10% of the order price to work out the cost of postage. To many companys still use this way of working out the post which can lead to problems if you have a small but expensive model. There post is great over £70 I think when it is free and at the lower end but the midway you can end up paying to much with the % of order rule. When I get a reply from them I will post the results.

 

[Beelzebrush]

Originally posted by gary
Well thanks for your point ritual it has inspired me to email el greco to find out the facts about the products they sell from pizarro, and I also wish to ask them why they use the out of date 10% of the order price to work out the cost of postage. To many companys still use this way of working out the post which can lead to problems if you have a small but expensive model. There post is great over £70 I think when it is free and at the lower end but the midway you can end up paying to much with the % of order rule. When I get a reply from them I will post the results.

If I was El Greco, I\'d tell you to bugger off! If you don\'t like how they do business or persist in making assumptions as to how their price their stock.... why not simply shop elsewhere? It seems a tad unfair to bring their reputation into question, especially when it seems they are an upstanding business.

I used to run an online shop and I can assure you that it\'s not a gravy-train.... The reality is that you work to very tight margins indeed. It\'s also a pain in the arse when people take up your valuable time with forum-rubbish like this.

 

[gary]

Beelzebrush I can only say thank god el greco deal with people differently from you then as they gave me a reply to my email straight away. They explained that there policy is to keep the same prices as the manufacturer, they havent comented on which price they paid but thats there choice and they have no reason to do so. The thing that confuses me is that I get questioned for making assunmptions and yet that is all you or ritual have done at least I have tried to find out some kind of facts from el greco.
I see threads started on a regular basis slagging of games workshop about there price charges but that seems ok but when I question why el greco had a higher price than the people who made the model then i\'m in the wrong. I simply was interested to find out the reason why the prices where so different and it is within my rights as a member of this forum to ask this question. If you don\'t like the thread and where it has gone well in your own words you can bugger off :moon:

 

[Ritual]

The difference between your assumptions and mine is that you made accusations of a company based on yours. And that is what I criticised you for...

I think it\'s good that you asked El Greco about this. Next time, do it before posting on a public forum that a company is ripping you off.

And I still don\'t understand why you think El Greco\'s price on this particular product is questionable when the price of the product on Pizarro\'s site is 40 EUR. The anomality here is clearly the £20.12 Pizarro is charging in GBP, as that is clearly losing them a sizeable chunk of money. But that is their headache...

 

[Beelzebrush]

I hope you ordered something from them!

 

[gary]

Yes I placed an order with pizarro and it has all gone through so I can recomend them on that front. I recieved another email from el greco thanking me for pointing out the price issue and they have said they will be contacting pizarro to question them on the issue of price differences and said they hope that this doesn\'t put me of ordering from them.

 

[elgreco]

Apologies for coming late in the day on this but we are very concerned by this directed attack at ourselves which has only come to our attention now. As Ritual mentioned above, before slandering our company about our prices, you should have sent out an e-mail before slamming all this on the forum.

We answered your query immediately when you finally decided to contact us and Pizarro wrote back to us that they charge customers in Euros. Do not compare us with Historex or any other company. Are you saying that we should sell the products at the discount rate that we are given by the manufacturers? Our policy is to price the figure at the same price, if not slightly lower, than that of the manufacturer. Apparently you only looked at the Pizarro kits. And we do NOT add a mark-up at all on all our prices!!

I also explained our postage policy to you. You complain of the 10% charge and the matter was explained to you in our reply e-mail. We send ALL items by Recorded / Special and International Signed For delivery in most cases. So if the item is "small but expensive", you would receive it by Special Next Day delivery for a GUARANTEED delivery. We explained all this to you in our reply and yet you have not bothered to correct your thread or "post the results" as you said you would. From experience, we have learnt the hard way that packages do get lost and that some dishonest customers try to pull a fast one too!!

Luckily for you, you got the kit from Pizarro! May you divulge how much you paid for it in the end? As a sidenote, this is the answer we received from them when we sent them a query regarding the matter:
"I am surprised by your comments since we have not done or will do discount of that magnitude to any customer, be it the United Kingdom and America. Our figures are always paid in euros, you are the only ones which we allow you to pay in Pounds. On the other hand shall look on our website to see where the error is." Regretfully their website still displays this discrepancy in the currency rate but believe you me, we paid more than £20.12 to get The Dance, even with the trade discount!!

I appreciate that this thread is probably considered 'closed' but I felt we needed to put matters straight here in writing for other readers to know the facts.

Thank you,
Celine

 

[elgreco]

I\'ll just chip in here about the postage. I recently had to send two packets , identical, one within the UK the other airmail to Spain. It was cheaper to send to Spain! Even the post office counter staff couldn\'t believe it.

Ditto! We regularly send "same weight" parcels to UK and Europe and the postage to the UK is between 50p - £1.00 more. No matter how hard the PO counter staff try to get around it!!

 

[elgreco]

Your words, not mine.

And as the currency in Spain is Euro the real price of the product is €40 and that is £37 with current exchange rate. I have no idea why Pizarro charges customers half the price if they chose GBP instead of Euro, but that seems like an error to me. I don\'t expect they WANT to lose half the income on products just because someone happen to pay in GBP. Can\'t you see that this is what is strange? Not that El Greco charges a price that is £3 less than what the price from Pizarro SHOULD be according to current exchange rates.

Furthermore, don\'t piss on El Greco for Royal Mail shipping prices. That is what you\'re doing in the quote above.

Also further to this - the actual price of the kits is in Euros. As traders, we do not go through the online store!! So the trade discount is calculated on the Euro price.

Gary - a bit of common sense would indicate here that the Pizarro currency convertor is incorrect, based on the old Euro/GBP rate which is actually round the time when Pizarro first came on the market.

 

[DXM]

I have used these and historex for a long time as my mini market of choice, but as of late i\'m getting tired of being ripped of more and more. The model I want is almost double from elgrecominiatures and then the big insult is they want more on postage from uk to uk than pizarro want on spain to the uk. If I have to I will use a uk stockist but I prefer to buy from source now, I hope if enough people do this the uk stockists will stop taking the p*** with customers. Ok rant over and thanks for trying to help me it is most welcome.
Gary

For the postage, it's the same that happens here in Canada.
To ship a miniature under .24kg( valve under $100) across Canada will cost about $14-$16 CDN to ship the same parcel to the US will only cost $5.45. The difference is the Canadian will get his package in 5-6 days with tracking and insurance, the American will have only insurance, no tracking and receive it in 14 Business days ( 3 weeks ). I can't even ship that parcel across the street for less than $7.00. Canada Post charges for distance travelled and speedy delivery and there is no cheap mail either,. I can send within Canada this miniature or a cement block for roughly the same cost, explain that. I have lost count of how many time I have had to explain to Canadian customers that I was not ripping them off. I sent them a link to the Calculating page of Canada Post with size and weight and our postal code and told them to send a parcel to us. It's a real eye opener. Most of the time it's not the vendors fault for shipping costs it's the Post office.

 

[Roger Bunting]

I'd just like to thank ElGreco for clearing this up. Cheers!

 

[elgreco]

Just a further short update about the matter. Pizarro Miniatures have just advised us that they have fixed the "exchange rate" issue on their website. In fact, they have removed the currency convertor option altogether and all prices are now set in Euros only. This should avoid any future misunderstandings.

Many thanks
Celine

 

[Darkmessiah]

Iv got to say that iv ordered quite a few times from elgreco and their customer service and prices have always been excellent, even at the trade show they attended yesterday (south cheshire militaire) their prices were alot lower than other traders, in one case a mini was £5 cheaper than another traders.

Elgreco is an excellent company that iv used several times now, in fact iv just placed an order this morning, great customer service as always!

 

[Jazz is for losers]

Just been browsing El Greco and I remembered this thread. I plan to order a couple of miniatures, and I thought the prices seemed fair. Not really "discounted" in the sense of many online retailers, but I'm not sure how the company operates (B&M, web only etc), and given that the miniatures I want are not in the mass-seller category I thought that the charges on what I am looking for (Yedharo and Enigma) looked ok, in the sense that at first glance they're cheaper than their competitors. However I have a minor quibble with the Forge World style delivery rates of 10% on orders under £70, though I think it still works out slightly cheaper than the other places I've been looking at. I might just put off the purchase for a while and place an order of £70+, they do stock a wide range of high quality small/niche manufacturers that I'm interested in.

So with this in mind, orders of £70+ seem good, orders of <£70 might not exactly be ruthlessly discounted but at the same time they're not over-priced. Of course this may vary depending on what the buyer is seeking and I can only speak for the small percentage of stock that I've browsed, so it's a good thing that there's competition out there, if you can get better value and service from an alternate retailer you should buy through the alternate retailer.

 

[elgreco]

Just been browsing El Greco and I remembered this thread. I plan to order a couple of miniatures, and I thought the prices seemed fair. Not really "discounted" in the sense of many online retailers, but I'm not sure how the company operates (B&M, web only etc), and given that the miniatures I want are not in the mass-seller category I thought that the charges on what I am looking for (Yedharo and Enigma) looked ok, in the sense that at first glance they're cheaper than their competitors. However I have a minor quibble with the Forge World style delivery rates of 10% on orders under £70, though I think it still works out slightly cheaper than the other places I've been looking at. I might just put off the purchase for a while and place an order of £70+, they do stock a wide range of high quality small/niche manufacturers that I'm interested in.

So with this in mind, orders of £70+ seem good, orders of <£70 might not exactly be ruthlessly discounted but at the same time they're not over-priced. Of course this may vary depending on what the buyer is seeking and I can only speak for the small percentage of stock that I've browsed, so it's a good thing that there's competition out there, if you can get better value and service from an alternate retailer you should buy through the alternate retailer.

Thanks for the comments and in this respect I'd like to explain our pricing policy. We do not compare our prices to other online retailers, but to the ORIGINAL PRICE FROM THE MANUFACTURER. So if a product is priced at US$ XX or EUR YY, then we price it at its equivalent in GB£. And ALL kits are in stock unless otherwise stated on the website, so - unlike other online retailers who may operate differently by stocking an item only when the customer orders it - the customer will receive the item immediately (unless it's sold out after a model show).

As for the postage rates, you have to understand that we have a massive stock list and it is impossible to price each item individually for postage. The domestic rate at 10% is fairly priced and you will find that in very little instances is it wide off the actual postage price. We have not increased our postage prices in our 5 years of trading, despite a First Class stamp is now at 41p. ALL items over £15.00 are sent by FIRST CLASS RECORDED delivery; and orders over £40.00 (standard RM compensation in case of loss) are sent out by SPECIAL DELIVERY. It is safer this way than waiting and claiming for compensation. Orders over £70 are sent free and by Special Delivery too. Believe you me when I say that at times it is cheaper to send an Airmail packet to mainland Europe than to send the same packet to a UK address. Also the 10% incorporates packaging and credit card fee handling charges, which other companies may charge separately as a handling fee. You mention Enigma Miniatures - as an example of local rates - average price of £8.75, so local postage would be 88p. In this case, we go out of pocket as a small packet under 100gr costs £1.39 to send.

We try to be fair in our pricing. Hope this helps to clarify any questions/niggling doubts!

Cheers
Celine

 

[Jazz is for losers]

I suppose price-linked postage negates the need to increase postage charges though in most cases? Regardless, I think you're right, it's a fair system and probably works out to be very close to most other systems, maybe sometimes slightly cheaper but at other times slightly more expensive. I'm sure flat-rate postage charge has drawbacks/benefits for consumers too. And I didn't notice the recorded/special delivery aspect, this definately adds value for many people.

I think it's the connection to the FW system that I (unfairly) mentioned that initially makes me think twice, but closer analysis brings up the fact that FW products are even more over-priced than every other manufacturer in the business (making the postage rates equally over-priced), the fact that all of their products are very lightweight adding further insult to injury.
So yes I agree that the 10% El Greco postage rate is fair, and the free postage on £70+ orders is great.