One thing i have come to realize is that if you do your research right the quality of products from China or Taiwan can be very good.
And you are right, for a UK company to compete with the Ebay chinese sellers is to buy in bulk.
You have to get it in by sea so you have to wait about 10 weeks, and then you get stung with the VAT when you bring it in, so unless you are VAT registered expect to pay £1500 VAT on a £10000 order.
You also pay the duty that can be about another 5%.
The cost to get it from china is not a lot, but you get stung with a lot of customs and port charges, and then a masive charge to get it from the UK port to your address.
This cost from the port is about 4 times the cost from the Chinese port to the UK port. (Go figure)
My last order cost me over £2000 just to clear it from customs.
I get asked all the time to add other products to our range, but we cant afford to spread ourselves too thin, because in this induestry word of mouth is the best advertisement, so we try to stock 90% of what we have in our range, with the other 10% either on the sea or in stock at another company.


Quote Originally Posted by Jeremy View Post
Gary,

At the time I purchased these, the only UK vendor I could find wanted more than £400 for the same parts, so I thought I'd made quite a considerable saving even if I did get stung for VAT etc. I now realise that I could have bought these parts from you for around £183 inc VAT, which is almost certainly what I would have done had I known that you sold them, for just the reasons you've given.

At the moment, having bought quite a few items from China, I'm now prepared for a loss on one before too long, just based on the law of averages with things going wrong. Even so, I have to say that I'll most probably still come out on top, given the good fortune I've had so far.

I can understand, and sympathise, with UK vendors trying to compete with the Chinese. I doubt many consumers understand the risks, or even notice the often very high postage charges on ebay for goods from China. As far as I can see, the only way to compete with the Chinese ebay vendors is most probably to buy goods in bulk direct from the Chinese manufacturers, ship them by sea to save costs and hope that the quality is such that the return rate doesn't cause you to make a loss. All told a fairly risky enterprise, I would have thought.

Jeremy

PS: Now I know that you stock stuff I'll be buying some parts for the Z axis direct from you, as soon as I've finally decided what I need.