Originally Posted by Treehouse_Ryan
We talked at length about this. Here are most of the reasons it's a problem:
* Fairly substantial additional costs to ship them to the second warehouse and pay another team to count and inventory and store them. Would either have to eat those costs and lose margin for those units, or charge more for them to make it up. If this was the only problem, we would have eaten the charges in order to provide much better service to you all....
* Getting the tins over to the UK and through customs would take enough time that no one would get theirs until well after they beat the game and started to care less about it all. It post-poned the shipping date by a minimum of three weeks, but it easily could have stretched longer....
* If we have Tins in the UK warehouse, they have to be sold to only international customers because we owe VAT on anything that moves out of that warehouse. So the number of tins over there have to exist independently of the number of tins in the US warehouse, which means we have to decide up front how many we're sending over, and that means the UK/US inventories would sell out separately from each other, and if we over- or under- estimated how many would sell to each region, we'd have either dead stock, or other logistical problems. We didn't have any information on which to base this decsion because the KoA editions weren't allowed to be sold internationally, so we'd have had to make an already tough decision on the back of zero data.
* Assuming we have two sets of independent inventory now, we have to make the website able to track both and offer them to the right people at the right times. if the stocks weren't handled separately, some extras in the US would be able to be sold to someone expecting them to come from the UK, which is a problem on its face, but is also a nightmare from a taxes/shipping-rate point of view. To make the website do this, we'd need to either create a third item - "Add-On (Int'l Shipping Option)" or something - in order to track its inventory separately. But how many people do you think would get that wrong? The alternative is that we have another whole website, like on the BioWare and PopCap stores, where you have to know to toggle your site preference by clicking an icon in the header, and then it's set in a cookie, but if you don't explicitly do this, you don't get access to the UK inventory. Oh, and this store would only have one item in it, because we don't have other Dead Space gear in the UK at this time, so you'd have to jump through that hoop a couple times to reset yourself from being locked into that second store so you could see the other Dead Space (or etc) stuff we're going to put out....
So, yes, our international distribution needs some work before it's practical for you guys (or us, really). The good news is that we're exploring a lot of different options here, and are working really hard to get it under control (someone's coming in for a meeting about some of this later today). But we definitely couldn't work it out in time for it to matter for this project.
If anyone has a lot of experience with this, or has bought from US companies that have a less painful process, PM me with some details and we'll track down everything we can....
This is tricky, on account of how much money the publishers invest in these games. While I think it would be incredibly valuable to do that, I don't know if it would be possible to solicit ideas without essentially leaking information about whatever deal we have to do one well ahead of time.
I'd love to talk to everyone here about general things that they like and dislike. Or if you guys wanted to speculate publicly about possible CEs we could do based on what games we already have stores for, I would read those and chime in vaguely wherever I could, but it's very sticky ground.
At the very least, I'd love to work out some exclusive content for you all, in terms of maybe announcing the next one here first, or working out an interview you could post that has content other media sites wouldn't, or getting someone an early sample to post an exclusive unboxing or something....
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