A question for my European brothers and sisters accross the pond. If those are your retail prices for Transformers, isn't it cheaper to buy from North American distributors and just pay international shipping? I understand that the boats from China have to travel significantly farther to get to Europe than to get to California, but those prices are ridiculous.
It should be but the shipping, custom charges, and general transit times almost always manages to screw us over
Pretty much, one way or another we always have to pay a small fortune, especially for the really good stuff that we're not deemed worthy of.
Oh you had to remind me of the shit they pulled at the begining of 2010 where i ended up paying close to 40 quid extra on som BBTS stuff(both the customs charge and the ransom)
Like I mentioned earlier, many times buying from BBTS/eBay even with all the extra charges is cheaper than to buy from our stores (and I can get stuff past wave1). But in most cases you end up with approximately the same prices and going to the customs office to pick up and pay for our international orders is very annoying. It's a state institution with very inconvenient office hours and it's closed on Saturdays and Sundays, so there is no chance for us to get there without taking half a day off from work. If you're not from the few special regional post offices, it will take a whole day and a lot of traveling (extra transport time/costs) to get to these centers. Spending your vacation on picking up toys - great way to make one's wife angry I say.
Damn i hope they come with free lube as Hasbro is really reaming you poor guys! Totally unfair to you guys , horrible pricing and WTF are they thinking decisions on what waves to bring over, can't be easy being a collector on that side of the pond.
I'm pretty sure those prices are for imported figures from Japan, not the retail releases (I've seen pretty similar ones on Archonia which show the figures with their japanese references like DA-01). The retail prices sould be much less.
I was importing 90% of my TFs anyway, so this doesn't affect me much. Serbian prices are already close to that ballpark, so I'm guessing our prices will likely be even greater.
Whoops, sorry, I read a few threads this morning while not being totally awake and I mixed some of the informations into something totally wrong like those prices being even higher than what they are. The prices I saw on Archonia are even higher that those (basically, 30€ for a Deluxe) but are indeed the japanese releases ones. Thanks for correcting!
the saddest thing is the fact that what the majority has not realised is Hasbro have downsized the size classes for the DotM line(due to cost of plastics and production, gimmicks, or whatever, the majority of toys are smaller) so we will be paying more, for even less
