Reply To: Price Disparity
Going to make some (educated*) guess, but theres a lot of overheads that a UK company will have to pay for sending goods outside of the UK- so they spread the costs over all the individual items….
These overheads include
Import /export taxes – even to & from the EU now!
Exchange rate at the time the prices are set – if the Pound is weak against the dollar when the prices are set (they’re not reviewed across the board for periods of time) then the disparity will look worse
Actual Ship Shipping rate costs – these are for ever changing, it very rare that even repeat regular large scale shipping gets block rates, they’re often worked out per sailing. So if the average comes down after the prices are set the excess is used to improve the buisness so they dont have to raise the prices when the average per sailing costs go up (ps air freight can have large disparities in cost & is more expensive for heavy or bulky items)
Now ironically a big company like GW can get lower overhead costs because they are shipping constantly, and small companies (rather than the medium size that is WL) will send that sporadically that their costs are noticeably lower as well…. so yeah WL are too big to slip through any tax /import nets and to small to negotiate lower rates.
*I work in a medium size manufacture in the UK and the wife deals with maritime and aviation accounts for a satellite communications provider.
The company I work for sends probably between half a dozen & a score of shipments abroad a month & we have a full time export clark … for WL to deal with each individual shipment to each individual country rather than block cost shipping (and taking a hit on some of these – hoping that the average over the month works out in credit to WL (so they have money left over) it would take a team of export clarks and ironically the increase overheads in manpower costs would actually drive the costs of some of those boxes UP not down).