Dubstepforum.com

germany. if most of the labels move to their own sites, i'll have to pass on a lot of releases as i can't afford these silly international shipping rates for every single record. what makes it even more annoying is that shipping in the opposite direction costs half or even less.
found out that that heart drive plate isn't exclusive to the exit store like they said on twitter. it's in at redeye so i'm hoping some shops over here get it, too.

hardwax has some dubstep & dnb. don't think they do exit tho

there are plenty good online shops, that's not a problem. question is, which releases they gonna get in now as st holdings is gone.

Unfortunately uk shipping costs are horrid. 5£ is standard for uk postage to mainland europe. Even from within UK it's looking like it's more cost effective to buy from abroad and ship the records in.

example... new hidden hawaii 12"s. 7.75£ at juno plus shipping = around 26£ might be a bit more. I can order the same tunes from hardwax with a better courier and get free wav's for about 28£. go figure. It's turned into a real dog eat dog market. and unfortunately were all unfortunately at the mercy of shipping costs. unless your dead lucky to have a decent shop nearby.

I do also think it's now a reflection of how many units are being sold. ST did massively inflate the dealer price of vinyl which led to the increase in retail prices. but then due to reduced sales labels have no choice but to raise the price. Unless we want every release as a whitelabel its a case of suck it up or dont buy any more

International shipping can be a bit of a rinse, sometimes a 12" to the US costing just as much as the record itself. Labels selling direct to customers is all well and good but you can sometimes be turning away customers, people not wanting to pay loads of international shipping, people not wanting to buy one thing at a time to justify the expense. Same goes for distro'ing to shops.

Plus services likes Bandcamp still take 15% off the top, as well as whatever Paypal fees are involved, which isn't far off what a lot of distro's charge anyway.

A single 12" record from UK to New Zealand only costs £3.88 (Redeye). Sounds like you lot are getting ripped.

Shipping isn't the problem, it's tax, getting records shipped to Dubai costs less than getting them sent within the UK lol.

nobody wrote:Shipping isn't the problem, it's tax, getting records shipped to Dubai costs less than getting them sent within the UK lol.

no, that's not the problem we were talking about here. the point was how buying single records from label sites makes vinyl buying more expensive because
a) the shipping rates are usually higher than in the big shops (for example 4.36 [redeye] to 5.15 [exit records] for a single 12" to germany).
b) you can't really save shipping costs by doing bulk orders, when you're just after the latest releases.

VAT has always been there and you either had/have to pay it or not (if you're lucky). and btw a lot of these small shops/label sites have fixed prices, which means shipping to a country, where you don't have to pay VAT, doesn't make it cheaper. for example in the exit records store shipping to dubai is 7.90, while the record price still stays at 8.50 (that's 16.40 total). so there you got:
c) fixed prices

fixed prices is the only downside with rwdfwd tbh.

rwdfwd ain't cheap

getting the special fuckmountain release and a punch drunk was staggeringly expensive considering it was getting posted like 3 miles at most from the other side of bristol