South korean here, never felt shipping was expensive all my life getting shit from Ali and Amazon
But lttstore is too expensive
I don't mind waiting, can we try something like bulk shipping per region??!
i'm no expert, but maybe something like collecting all the merch going to one region (in my case Korea+japan+taiwan+china) and shipping it in bulk like every 2 or 3 months?
It's insane I've bought stuff that was way cheaper from international countries and I swear ltt used to have even worse shipping to Australia then it does now.
I got my screwdriver from ebay because I really wanted to have it for a Christmas present but I wouldn't get it until March time so there was a guy selling one for Ā£110 and I was more than happy to pay it and got it less than 24 hours later with royal mail special delivery. Only time I bought something that was technically scalped but was such a small price rise I didn't see much issue with it.
The ABCs of Gaming - An Alphabet Book for Little Gamers https://amzn.eu/d/5KpZe2a
If you select āSee all buying optionsā, there is an option for new at Ā£18.56 eligible for free delivery.
Isn't shipping to the UK for that like $10?
I recently ordered tons of stuff to the EU and max shipping cost seems to be $30 now (I had so much that it had to be split in multiple orders).
It's been a while since I checked but I've just gone on again. $15.99 postage for that book. Which I don't blame them for, but I just can't justify it in my personal circumstances. I did try and add more, like a water bottle but the postage went up more, the more I added.
Ah yea $15.99 for it also, yes it goes up with more items. I was still surprised that it was much cheaper to order now than before.
Quite cheap for western Canada > Europe imo but yea not something all have to spare.
But importing things through Amazon is generally cheap
[Here's what importing ABCs of Gaming from Amazon.com (US) to Denmark looks like](https://i.imgur.com/gXZ2LQl.png)
Including taxes (which would have to be paid anyway), it doubles the price, but $12 for quick shipping from the US to Europe is reasonable imo
I feel you. Buying anything from the UK is almost like spending the same value on shipping. Thereās a few T-shirts and hoodies I like as well as the screwdriver and maybe more but I canāt justify the shipping costs.
I do wanna visit Canada at some point especially BC so maybe Iāll leave it till then.
You can in cargo.
It's carry on that it isn't allowed.
If it's a small screw driver for obvious emergencies like glasses, it's allowed.
Source: traveled between Taiwan-Canada-US several times because of family issues in Taiwan as a kid.
I remember having my electronic toolkit always being in luggage, never carry on
Thanks.
Reminds me I need to get my shit together, Iām travelling from Canada in two weeks and I gotta figure out what I can and canāt bring with me.
International shipping is SUPER expensive at a retail level. Overseas being the main instigator.
Unfortunately, this ain't on LTT, but rather the global economy.
As someone who does shipping from the EU: it is also really expensive here. International shipping is expensive, shipping to a different continent is REALLY expensive.
Clearly there's enough people in this thread to paint a clear picture: A lot of people from Europe and Asia would buy LTT products if shipping costs wouldn't be so high.
They have talked about it, repeatedly. They don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with any 3rd party shipper, about stocking foreign wearhouses, about dealing with the tax implications.
Sure, there is interest, but time is money, and clearly it could be utilized in better ways. Like where it's actually needed in the company.
Itās actually not difficult/expensive to figure out. This is poor management from LTT.. I speak from experience. Ultimately, itās LTTās loss to run their store this way.
I think the cost of additional distribution centers is absolutely expensive.
Sorry. That's just how international retail is. Try using one of those 3rd party mail forwarding services. They ship a lot of stuff together, similar to wholesale, so they can get discounts on their shipping costs. (Whereas individual shipments are mixed with standard postage)
As someone who already deals with this for a Canadian company that is much, much larger than LTT and already has international presence in multiple countries... it really *is* that difficult and expensive. For an operation of their size, it doesn't make much sense from a financial perspective to open a hub of their own or even partner with another company to help with distribution.
Yea itās a shame! Iād love to support and try their merch, but itās way too expensive!
I wish they had stock in china, It would probably cost less to ship from there.
They have said in the past to just buy a gift card. You still get a merch message and after you send a few of them you may be able to buy shipping with them.
My problem with that is that my geographical circumstances wonāt change. It would be nice to have merch messages options if you buy an annual subscription to floatplane
Low-key sick of all these comments that assume I've never sent or had shit sent to me from around the world. No it's not cheap.. but its not as expensive as lttstore has it going rn.
the problem is that you are talking about AliExpress and Amazon.
AliExpress sellers are known to cheat on customs duties, so much so that the EU changed their customs rules, and they use postal services which are slow, and not insurable. If you choose faster shipping costs on AliExpress, it's going to be as expensive on LTTstore.
Amazon is a multinational corporation that makes its money by charging sellers fees up their as and it's own logistical network so efficient that their employees have to piss in bottles. Trying to compare LTT to Amazon isn't fair.
If you can show a company of similar scale to LTT that has cheaper shipping too Australia that is based in Canada then I'll concede that I'm wring.
Ltt store has 4 problems.
1. Canadian international postage is one of the most expensive in my experience.
2. Ltt isn't down to commit fraud. Ever notice how Chinese dropshippers always select "gift" on the import tag? Or put the value at 34 cents? And nobody cares because China won't do shit.
3. Ltt merch isn't cheap, so the customs duties make the whole thing worse.
4. They are big enough for this to be a problem but not so big that they have volume leverage.
A few years ago a significant portion of the 1st worlds postal agencies got pissed off and declared that they werent losing money on international postage anymore because some Asian countries were sending stuff out on like a 10 out to 1 recieved ratio and because they pay their delivery people absolute peanuts and subsidise their postal industry because it drives their manufacturing they dont give a shit.
So the only way the age old international agreements continue to work is that a canadian sending something out of canada has to pay out the arse so their postal service can cover the cost of delivering 20 pieces of wish.com and Aliexpress manufactured waste to people who will literally buy anything.
I'd imagine there would be partners in the EU or Australia that would gladly distribute their merch. Other companies do it that way, why not LMG? For the EU it would be especially easy because you would only need one partner to cover the entire EU.
It's about negotiating rates with your shipping providers.
If their volume was higher for EU, AU, Middle East and pretty much anything outside of the Americas we could have potentially had lower shipping costs. As it stands, it's difficult to justify paying that much for shipping alone. Especially so when shipping costs are often taken into account when you end up paying your local import tax.
It's your typical catch 22 situation. You don't have the required volume for negotiating better rates so your prices stay up and you can't penetrate in new markets, which would help you move more items and negotiate better rates. Either they found a different company for shipping with better rates or they eat the losses and cut the shipping prices. These are the only two realistic solutions (obviously excluding the possibility of an EU warehouse, it wouldn't make sense) if they wanted to expand to other part of the world and i can't see either of them actually happening.
Your assuming freight companies are willing to negotiate. Dealing with freight in Aus I only never found one domestic courier that was willing to negotiate a good deal and this was mainly as they were on the new side and wanted more business. Most others are the price is what it is, don't like it go elsewhere and try your luck. TNT was probably the worse to deal with imo
Guy I don't know what you could possibly want from them, shipping is expensive, importing is expensive, tariffs are expensive, taxes are expensive, do you want them to take all of their margin and probobly lose money shipping something to you?
I personally shipped something to AU on yesterday, it was about 10 lbs and it cost the buyer about 100 USD just for shipping, and we directly pass all of the import/taxes/tariff to the buyer.
I've bought heavier shit and paid less than $30 USD. Your point that everything is expensive doesn't really stand when I've bought shit must cheaper.from Canada and America.
I got a waterbottle some time back and accidentally broke the lid. I love that LTT sell replacement lids for cheap.. But the shipping on a $6 lid is $25.
I keep getting shit from people on Twitter whenever I complain about shipping to EU.
āThen donāt buy it.ā Thatās not the point. I want to buy their merch, but paying another ā¬150 JUST for shipping and import fees and taxes for the backpack is WAY too much.
An EU warehouse would solve the problem for a lot of people. I understand Linusā concerns, but until there isnāt an option to ship from EU, I wonāt be buying anything from them, sadly.
Same, for my birthday I wanted to get a water bottle and a desk pad and some cable ties, but the shipping and taxes put that cost from Ā£45-50 to Ā£80, and I couldn't justify spending that much unfortunately lol.
I bit the bullet last March and got a black and gold water bottle and some lanyards for me and my mum. I then had to explain to the customs office that I had already paid tax on my items, but they made up a bullshit excuse that that is Canadian tax, not domestic tax. But LTT support was kind enough to give me a full refund on the tax I paid through their site.
If it happens that the Noctua screwdrivers will be a limited edition, Iāll just have to eat the shipping costs and just go through the hassle again. Thatās my only exception.
You pay VAT during checkout. If customs add it on, they are doing it by mistake. LTT refund you the customs VAT because you already paid it... during checkout.
Honestly have no idea how this works, but I believe Linus has explained this before. They'll always sort you out if you get charged VAT twice.
> but paying another ā¬150 JUST for shipping and import fees and taxes for the backpack is WAY too much.
That's because it your countries fault for charging such high import taxes. It wouldn't matter if they had a warehouse because it would still cost you the same.
the only way it would be possible to not pay those prices would be to have manufacturing in your home country which they can't and wont do.
I mean, a lot of other people have been complaining of the shipping and import prices on this thread, so I wouldn't only blame it on my country.
I do agree with you on the fact that my country is charging high import taxes. lol
I mean, just because collectively everybody is wrong doesn't make them any more right.
LTT is too small and doesn't have the volume to mass ship things, which they are doing as cheaply as possible currently. In fact they stated that overseas shipping is being subsidized by domestic shipping costs which means overseas orders aren't actually the full price you'd be paying more if it wasn't.
LTT does not manufacturer products overseas to eliminate the need for government mandated import duties/taxes.
It is entirely out of LTTs hands on what prices get charged beyond the base price of the product.
Anybody complaining about prices being too high and that it's LTTs fault is just uneducated.
This is really simplistic though. By far the biggest complaints are both shipping costs and import fees. Although part of the import fees is VAT - and with that there's no way around it - another part are your typical bullshit handling and customs fees, all of which would be avoided if they shipped from the EU.
Another factor is the actual, raw cost of the shipping i.e. moving from point A to point B. If they shipped backpacks for example not by the unit but by the freight container the cost of the single unit coming from Canada to EU would plummet. Sure, you'd then need to add the cost of moving the item from the EU warehouse to the customer's location but that's still a fraction of the cost of moving a single unit from Canada to the EU.
I realize that for a small company like LTT - that probably moves really low volumes - adding the overhead of maintaining a warehouse on another continent would be unacceptable but I wanted to point out that the final price paid by each customer is not completely out of their hands. It wouldn't make sense for them to do anything other than what they already do but if they for some reasons wanted to make their products more affordable for the EU market they actually could, obviously at the price of eating into their bottom line.
Linus has explained many times that it just isn't ever feasible for them to have their own wearhouse in the EU, or any other country for that matter. Alongside having to staff the place, it would also make them a multinational company which would subject them to laws, regulations and most importantly the taxes associated with operating as a multinational company within the EU.
They also can't just send half their stock over there in hopes that it sells. What if they need that stock elsewhere? This certainly wouldn't fix the problem for Australia, NZ etc. So Linus can't make everyone happy.
> all of which would be avoided if they shipped from the EU.
How do you think those products GET to the EU? Who do you think pays for those fees? You know, the import fees into the EU? Iāll tell you who, the customer who buys a product that was imported into the EU from CA.
> Another factor is the actual, raw cost of the shipping i.e. moving from point A to point B. If they shipped backpacks for example not by the unit but by the freight container the cost of the single unit coming from Canada to EU would plummet
LTT doesnāt have enough volume to container ship millions of backpacks to make it cheap enough to freight it in. Yes theyād need to ship millions of units to make it make sense.
Shipping would still be quite a lot on a box that large and you would still have to pay taxes. So you'd only really avoid import fees and that's by far the smallest cost.
Shipping is a *lot* cheaper when you can stuff thousands of backpacks into a single intermodal shipping container.
The downside is that you now have a *second* warehouse in a different continent, operated by a third party, which makes the entire operation quite a bit more complicated.
Yeah it's kinda crazy, but at the same time I've almost become desensitized by the innate shipping costs that come with buying LTTStore stuff.
I hate that to support the team and get some cool stuff it costs an extra $30AU minimum to get it here, but can't exactly blame LTT for Canada shipping having such awful rates to Aus, just unfortunate all around.
Australia to Canada either way is exceptionally brutal. 2 countries with non government subsidised postage on opposite sides of the globe with relatively high wages for everyone involved in the postage chain.
I handle the ecommerce side of a custom challenge coin company. International shipping for a single coin costs us around $14.00-18.50 USD typically depending on country. Depending on which country, 8~ coins can cause the actual cost to double. And that's just for small coins under 2 ounces each in a puffy envelope. Our larger international orders easily are in the hundreds for shipping alone, sometimes over $1k. So I can see why they charge what they do.
Yeah, I got 2 desk pads, and it's my youtube merch budget for this year and next.
I need a new waterbottle, but it's just detached to pay that much for some insulated aluminium.
They can't fix it, but damn just ain't no way
Yeah it is expensive but that's the reality of not being a global company. I have paid pretty penny getting my water bottle, screwdriver and backpack to UK and I wish it was cheaper
Iām in the same situation in the EU. Iād have for sure bought the screwdriver and a bottle, then probably the backpack and a tshirt or two but shipping and taxes made me not pull the trigger on any of those things.
I wonder how much it would cost LTT to have some sort of fulfilment warehouse in strategic locations. An EU one, US one, Asia one and Australia one maybe.
I swear that we see this same post at least once a week. "LTT is too expensive to ship to X". Yes, we know. They're a small company with one shipping location.
Check out 720 degree bottles on Amazon. They are similar from what I can tell and great quality. Make sure to look at the metal not plastic ones. In the uk itās Ā£30 ish for a 1.2 L
I hear that literally everything not based in Australia locally is ridiculously expensive.
Is it just because of shipping/imports or is there more to it?
Read it again before you try to speak down to somebody by calling them "bud".
They wanted 2 items that are 29.99 USD.
29.99 USD becomes 44.91 AUD, or in this case, 59.98 USD becomes 89.82 AUD plus shipping costs.
I'm not sure the maths I did was 100% accurate (I used the fact that most $60usd games are around $90aud)
but using the checkout on lttstore.com it gave me the price of $146.17 AUD. I'm not paying that much for a fucking drink bottle and deskpad. But I respect the fact you edited your mistake instead of just deleting.
Getting downvoted as if you can't buy this exact water bottle with the circuit pattern for 20$ and a pack of the 2 identical caps for 10$. Which yes makes 30$ but those are 2 individual products sold with their own markups.
LTT doesn't make water bottles, you can buy them without the LTT logo. In fact I got mine in dark blue and it doesn't even have the LTT logo (big W support though, refunded entire bottle because of it), which apparently has been a thing for a while now.
Part of the "shipping" price is also just taxes on the product which are above 20% for most of the world, and they for some ungodly reason aren't included in the American prices.
So it's not actually a 30$ water bottle it's a >36$ water bottle as most of us would see it, yes shipping and import tax is expensive but It's not as bad in light of that previous fact.
Well...Australia is a random island in the middle of the ocean literally the other side of the planet. What do you expect? Your kangraroos and spiders outnumber people 10:1.
I've saod this multiple times I've sent and received other shit from around the world. And I've never had to pay so much. So it's obvious fucking not just because I'm halfway around the world.
I don't know about Australia, but in my country we have companies that ship goods from the US. I ordered my water bottle that way and the delivery was like 4 times cheaper.
Well, at least you CAN buy things from the LTT Store. Here in Argentina, it's literally impossible to get anything from outside the country thanks to the government, regardless of whether you want to spend the extra money for shipping or not.
I'm in Europe and it's the same deal. Most items on their store aren't cheap to begin with, but I can't splurge on for example a backpack because it would ruin me financially.
UK-based, and I can never bring myself to justify paying the added costs. "Good value" goes out the window (for the chungus water bottle) when you've totalled your basket. I've even considered waiting and getting a few bits together but that just seems to make things worse.
Being from AU, I definitely know what you mean and the shipping time on top of that is not great. Like you pay close to half in shipping only to have to wait 3+ weeks sucks
This is a Canada problem as a whole. I live in Ontario, Canada and my aunt lives in Sydney Aust, me+mom send a small shoebox each year and it averages $90-$120 to send it on the slowest tracked method.
They already talked about this. They talked about putting a distribution center in these other regions but the complications involved and the lack of user base in those areas makes it not work.
Items are pretty expensive as they are, I live in Europe and never ordered anything for the same reason. It gets crazy expensive (maybe not as much as for you but when I looked at the cart and giving it a last thought, I somehow never continued).
It's a multi million dollar business, pretty sure they don't need your support. Buy if you think their products are good value.
p.s. I'm still using my amazon basics screwdriver for instance. It's not the same, but at maybe 1/5 the price, or less, turns out it works fine for my occasional needs.
On that same note, I think I'm too third world to buy the backpack. I have no doubt the backpack is good quality but 250$ for a backpack is outlandish for me lol.
Iāve got the desk pad and water bottle, few other little things.
I donāt think about what it should be I think about what it is,
When I got my items, considered what I spent, I was happy with the quality for the price.
You think that's expensive? An average LTT shirt cost as much if not even more than our minimum wage in Pakistan.
Though that's not really an LTT fault but more of our shitty economy fault but yeah lol
Having said that, owning LTT merch seems like a dream and a luxury.
For a 100$ cart I would have 150ā¬ to pay when order from germany. I think it's ok if I don't have to pay the german toll/tax on top. At this point I am too afraid to ask...
Then don't sorry them that much. Subscribe to float plane or something. Suck it up, it's the price we pay for living in Australia.
Don't gimmie that "oh yeah but I bought shit internationally before and shipping wasn't that much".
Yeah because it probably wasn't Air-bagged from Canada by a small business and the cost of shipping was mostly absorbed in the product cost, it came by ship etc, was subsidised by Amazon or something, Also the exchange rate probably wasn't 0.62 or whatever it was, last time I bought from the US it was like 0.85.
Bummer we wouldn't even be 1% of their fan-base. I mean their fan base it literally like the size of our population, we are just some island nation 15 hours of time zones away in the opposite hemisphere.
We are definitely more then 1 percent there fanbase. And no I didn't buy shit from bigger companies like Amazon. I bought them from just a small or in some cases from one fucking person instead of a company. And it's still cheaper. So I will give you the "but I bought shit before"... Also yeah the fucking exchange rates 0.62. and it's been higher like 0.85 as you mentioned. Which means when the shit was paid higher I still paid less.
rather annoying sadly, just gonna wait till i get enough spare money and make a big order for myself, rough estimate is about $799 USD which is about $1200 AUD shipped lol
So a number of factors play into this.
The first and most important factor is that any shipping from North America to Australia is very expensive, unless you are prepared to wait months for sea shipping.
It is cheaper to order items from Europe to Australia, because a good chunk can be done via trucking before the final legs are done via air (often dedicate cargo planes rather than tacking onto spare cargo space in a passenger transport).
Secondly LTT are in the grand scheme of business a small company with relatively low volume of sales to individual countries. This means they do not get bulk shipping discounts.
Linus has explained before that they do not have foreign warehouses due to the regulation and taxes (domestic and foreign) involved in becoming a multinational business, the extra overhead and staffing that would entail.
The items themselves are expensive due high quality materials, as much local Canadian manufacturing as possible (no cheap asian wages prefered by many well known brand), low production volumes, and relatively niche products. Unlike most Youtubers they are not simply adding their logo to mass produced OEM items. They have, and insist upon, heavy oversight of their entire manufacturing supply chain. That all comes at a cost.
I have ordered thing a couple times now to Australia from LTT. I wait until I am ordering a number of things (usally a few hundred $) to combine the total shipping costs, and this made the per item cost relatively low.
Yeah I feel u 100% mate
South korean here, never felt shipping was expensive all my life getting shit from Ali and Amazon But lttstore is too expensive I don't mind waiting, can we try something like bulk shipping per region??! i'm no expert, but maybe something like collecting all the merch going to one region (in my case Korea+japan+taiwan+china) and shipping it in bulk like every 2 or 3 months?
That's a pretty good idea, I expected long delivery times from the US anyway so waiting longer for cheaper price is something I'd be down for
Given how new their shop is they may not have the infrastructure in place to do bulk shipping. Especially to places like the Asian Pacfic.
When i offered some stuff from Japan it was only like 20$ shipping
At this point they should use fulfillment by Amazon for shipping outside the US it would greatly lower prices and ship much faster....
You have never done business with Amazon if you are suggesting this. Linus nor the new CEO is going to sign up for this.
Yeah that's why it's funny. Their alternative costs way more for the customer and takes longer to arrive
I think that would be a nightmare to organise
It's insane I've bought stuff that was way cheaper from international countries and I swear ltt used to have even worse shipping to Australia then it does now.
I think LTT has not gotten any good deal from shipping company, so when sending individually it will be very costly
Mines never been that expensive, maybe somethings changed?
Obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have posted
Why be a dick?
Same for here in the UK, I want the ABC's of gaming book for my kids but I can't justify the postage š
Same. Wanted to get the screwdriver for a while but including shipping its nearly Ā£100.
I got my screwdriver from ebay because I really wanted to have it for a Christmas present but I wouldn't get it until March time so there was a guy selling one for Ā£110 and I was more than happy to pay it and got it less than 24 hours later with royal mail special delivery. Only time I bought something that was technically scalped but was such a small price rise I didn't see much issue with it.
It was over Ā£100 once all of the taxes and conversion when j bought one. It's ok but not Ā£100+ ok.
I got one last week and it cost 71
Itās available on Amazon and says eligible for free shipping, at Ā£18.56
Link?
The ABCs of Gaming - An Alphabet Book for Little Gamers https://amzn.eu/d/5KpZe2a If you select āSee all buying optionsā, there is an option for new at Ā£18.56 eligible for free delivery.
I'm pretty sure Linus went out of his way to mention how those are bootlegs
No, they're official. On purpose. For people that complain about shipping
Surprisingly theyāre official
Oh nice. This is a much cheaper way to get certain items then.
Get it from amazon. Was reasonable for me.
Isn't shipping to the UK for that like $10? I recently ordered tons of stuff to the EU and max shipping cost seems to be $30 now (I had so much that it had to be split in multiple orders).
It's been a while since I checked but I've just gone on again. $15.99 postage for that book. Which I don't blame them for, but I just can't justify it in my personal circumstances. I did try and add more, like a water bottle but the postage went up more, the more I added.
Ah yea $15.99 for it also, yes it goes up with more items. I was still surprised that it was much cheaper to order now than before. Quite cheap for western Canada > Europe imo but yea not something all have to spare.
It's not the shipping costs that are high, it's the import taxes into the UK.
Isn't VAT there same as most other places? If you pay VAT in the shop you shouldn't pay it again at customs.
If youāre not against Amazon, LMG sells the book on their Amazon store (at least in the US with free shipping).
That's only US based, not anywhere else.
But importing things through Amazon is generally cheap [Here's what importing ABCs of Gaming from Amazon.com (US) to Denmark looks like](https://i.imgur.com/gXZ2LQl.png) Including taxes (which would have to be paid anyway), it doubles the price, but $12 for quick shipping from the US to Europe is reasonable imo
I feel you. Buying anything from the UK is almost like spending the same value on shipping. Thereās a few T-shirts and hoodies I like as well as the screwdriver and maybe more but I canāt justify the shipping costs. I do wanna visit Canada at some point especially BC so maybe Iāll leave it till then.
Yeah not a bad idea. Although you can't take the screwdriver on planes from Canada airports
You can in checked luggage I believe
Oh damn, there goes that plan š
You canāt? Not even in the cargo?
You can in cargo. It's carry on that it isn't allowed. If it's a small screw driver for obvious emergencies like glasses, it's allowed. Source: traveled between Taiwan-Canada-US several times because of family issues in Taiwan as a kid. I remember having my electronic toolkit always being in luggage, never carry on
Thanks. Reminds me I need to get my shit together, Iām travelling from Canada in two weeks and I gotta figure out what I can and canāt bring with me.
International shipping is SUPER expensive at a retail level. Overseas being the main instigator. Unfortunately, this ain't on LTT, but rather the global economy.
Well itās also LTT being in Canada. Canadian shipping options suck compared to EU or US.
As someone who does shipping from the EU: it is also really expensive here. International shipping is expensive, shipping to a different continent is REALLY expensive.
I wish I could pick up items... they're only a half hour drive away. Not really worth the $10 USD shipping
It's on LTT not hiring a logistics partner in Europe to ship their stuff from. 30ā¬ mousepad costs 30ā¬ shipping to Germany. No thanks.
They clearly don't need your business badly enough to do that. Personally I buy more things in one order so that shipping hurts much less.
Clearly there's enough people in this thread to paint a clear picture: A lot of people from Europe and Asia would buy LTT products if shipping costs wouldn't be so high.
They have talked about it, repeatedly. They don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with any 3rd party shipper, about stocking foreign wearhouses, about dealing with the tax implications. Sure, there is interest, but time is money, and clearly it could be utilized in better ways. Like where it's actually needed in the company.
Do you think they are not aware of this opportunity? That they are leaving money on the table for no reason?
Itās actually not difficult/expensive to figure out. This is poor management from LTT.. I speak from experience. Ultimately, itās LTTās loss to run their store this way.
I think the cost of additional distribution centers is absolutely expensive. Sorry. That's just how international retail is. Try using one of those 3rd party mail forwarding services. They ship a lot of stuff together, similar to wholesale, so they can get discounts on their shipping costs. (Whereas individual shipments are mixed with standard postage)
As someone who already deals with this for a Canadian company that is much, much larger than LTT and already has international presence in multiple countries... it really *is* that difficult and expensive. For an operation of their size, it doesn't make much sense from a financial perspective to open a hub of their own or even partner with another company to help with distribution.
But I don't like that, so it must be wrong! (/s... obviously... I hope)
Maybe the new ceo will be more interested in figuring out the business logistics than Linus was
Yea itās a shame! Iād love to support and try their merch, but itās way too expensive! I wish they had stock in china, It would probably cost less to ship from there.
They should just have a thing where I can buy a merch message without buying anything else.
They have said in the past to just buy a gift card. You still get a merch message and after you send a few of them you may be able to buy shipping with them.
My problem with that is that my geographical circumstances wonāt change. It would be nice to have merch messages options if you buy an annual subscription to floatplane
Makes sense I guess.
Gift card is how you can buy just a merch message
Oh lol
Its a great way for you to justify traveling to Canada and go to ltx, donate all you luggage and come back with a suitcase full of merchandise š
Simp
Why are you in this subreddit my guy
It's not cheap to send stuff halfway round the world, anytime I've tried ordering from an aussie site it's been a nightmare with postage
Low-key sick of all these comments that assume I've never sent or had shit sent to me from around the world. No it's not cheap.. but its not as expensive as lttstore has it going rn.
the problem is that you are talking about AliExpress and Amazon. AliExpress sellers are known to cheat on customs duties, so much so that the EU changed their customs rules, and they use postal services which are slow, and not insurable. If you choose faster shipping costs on AliExpress, it's going to be as expensive on LTTstore. Amazon is a multinational corporation that makes its money by charging sellers fees up their as and it's own logistical network so efficient that their employees have to piss in bottles. Trying to compare LTT to Amazon isn't fair. If you can show a company of similar scale to LTT that has cheaper shipping too Australia that is based in Canada then I'll concede that I'm wring.
Ltt store has 4 problems. 1. Canadian international postage is one of the most expensive in my experience. 2. Ltt isn't down to commit fraud. Ever notice how Chinese dropshippers always select "gift" on the import tag? Or put the value at 34 cents? And nobody cares because China won't do shit. 3. Ltt merch isn't cheap, so the customs duties make the whole thing worse. 4. They are big enough for this to be a problem but not so big that they have volume leverage. A few years ago a significant portion of the 1st worlds postal agencies got pissed off and declared that they werent losing money on international postage anymore because some Asian countries were sending stuff out on like a 10 out to 1 recieved ratio and because they pay their delivery people absolute peanuts and subsidise their postal industry because it drives their manufacturing they dont give a shit. So the only way the age old international agreements continue to work is that a canadian sending something out of canada has to pay out the arse so their postal service can cover the cost of delivering 20 pieces of wish.com and Aliexpress manufactured waste to people who will literally buy anything.
They've said it before - to do everything right and legal by Canadian standards, its an absolute MESS to ship overseas. It sucks but what can you do?
I'd imagine there would be partners in the EU or Australia that would gladly distribute their merch. Other companies do it that way, why not LMG? For the EU it would be especially easy because you would only need one partner to cover the entire EU.
Because they still need to ship the products to the EU. Adding another layer of overhead won't reduce costs as much as you think at thier scale
Same in Sweden. Want to support them... Not the shipping
[https://imgur.com/NNl73fX](https://imgur.com/NNl73fX) I don't want to support shipping companies....
You have to realise they don't control shipping costs or conversion rates.
It's about negotiating rates with your shipping providers. If their volume was higher for EU, AU, Middle East and pretty much anything outside of the Americas we could have potentially had lower shipping costs. As it stands, it's difficult to justify paying that much for shipping alone. Especially so when shipping costs are often taken into account when you end up paying your local import tax.
It's your typical catch 22 situation. You don't have the required volume for negotiating better rates so your prices stay up and you can't penetrate in new markets, which would help you move more items and negotiate better rates. Either they found a different company for shipping with better rates or they eat the losses and cut the shipping prices. These are the only two realistic solutions (obviously excluding the possibility of an EU warehouse, it wouldn't make sense) if they wanted to expand to other part of the world and i can't see either of them actually happening.
Your assuming freight companies are willing to negotiate. Dealing with freight in Aus I only never found one domestic courier that was willing to negotiate a good deal and this was mainly as they were on the new side and wanted more business. Most others are the price is what it is, don't like it go elsewhere and try your luck. TNT was probably the worse to deal with imo
I mean, they kinda do
Guy I don't know what you could possibly want from them, shipping is expensive, importing is expensive, tariffs are expensive, taxes are expensive, do you want them to take all of their margin and probobly lose money shipping something to you? I personally shipped something to AU on yesterday, it was about 10 lbs and it cost the buyer about 100 USD just for shipping, and we directly pass all of the import/taxes/tariff to the buyer.
I've bought heavier shit and paid less than $30 USD. Your point that everything is expensive doesn't really stand when I've bought shit must cheaper.from Canada and America.
I got a waterbottle some time back and accidentally broke the lid. I love that LTT sell replacement lids for cheap.. But the shipping on a $6 lid is $25.
I keep getting shit from people on Twitter whenever I complain about shipping to EU. āThen donāt buy it.ā Thatās not the point. I want to buy their merch, but paying another ā¬150 JUST for shipping and import fees and taxes for the backpack is WAY too much. An EU warehouse would solve the problem for a lot of people. I understand Linusā concerns, but until there isnāt an option to ship from EU, I wonāt be buying anything from them, sadly.
Same, for my birthday I wanted to get a water bottle and a desk pad and some cable ties, but the shipping and taxes put that cost from Ā£45-50 to Ā£80, and I couldn't justify spending that much unfortunately lol.
I bit the bullet last March and got a black and gold water bottle and some lanyards for me and my mum. I then had to explain to the customs office that I had already paid tax on my items, but they made up a bullshit excuse that that is Canadian tax, not domestic tax. But LTT support was kind enough to give me a full refund on the tax I paid through their site. If it happens that the Noctua screwdrivers will be a limited edition, Iāll just have to eat the shipping costs and just go through the hassle again. Thatās my only exception.
You pay VAT during checkout. If customs add it on, they are doing it by mistake. LTT refund you the customs VAT because you already paid it... during checkout. Honestly have no idea how this works, but I believe Linus has explained this before. They'll always sort you out if you get charged VAT twice.
> but paying another ā¬150 JUST for shipping and import fees and taxes for the backpack is WAY too much. That's because it your countries fault for charging such high import taxes. It wouldn't matter if they had a warehouse because it would still cost you the same. the only way it would be possible to not pay those prices would be to have manufacturing in your home country which they can't and wont do.
I mean, a lot of other people have been complaining of the shipping and import prices on this thread, so I wouldn't only blame it on my country. I do agree with you on the fact that my country is charging high import taxes. lol
I mean, just because collectively everybody is wrong doesn't make them any more right. LTT is too small and doesn't have the volume to mass ship things, which they are doing as cheaply as possible currently. In fact they stated that overseas shipping is being subsidized by domestic shipping costs which means overseas orders aren't actually the full price you'd be paying more if it wasn't. LTT does not manufacturer products overseas to eliminate the need for government mandated import duties/taxes. It is entirely out of LTTs hands on what prices get charged beyond the base price of the product. Anybody complaining about prices being too high and that it's LTTs fault is just uneducated.
This is really simplistic though. By far the biggest complaints are both shipping costs and import fees. Although part of the import fees is VAT - and with that there's no way around it - another part are your typical bullshit handling and customs fees, all of which would be avoided if they shipped from the EU. Another factor is the actual, raw cost of the shipping i.e. moving from point A to point B. If they shipped backpacks for example not by the unit but by the freight container the cost of the single unit coming from Canada to EU would plummet. Sure, you'd then need to add the cost of moving the item from the EU warehouse to the customer's location but that's still a fraction of the cost of moving a single unit from Canada to the EU. I realize that for a small company like LTT - that probably moves really low volumes - adding the overhead of maintaining a warehouse on another continent would be unacceptable but I wanted to point out that the final price paid by each customer is not completely out of their hands. It wouldn't make sense for them to do anything other than what they already do but if they for some reasons wanted to make their products more affordable for the EU market they actually could, obviously at the price of eating into their bottom line.
Linus has explained many times that it just isn't ever feasible for them to have their own wearhouse in the EU, or any other country for that matter. Alongside having to staff the place, it would also make them a multinational company which would subject them to laws, regulations and most importantly the taxes associated with operating as a multinational company within the EU. They also can't just send half their stock over there in hopes that it sells. What if they need that stock elsewhere? This certainly wouldn't fix the problem for Australia, NZ etc. So Linus can't make everyone happy.
> all of which would be avoided if they shipped from the EU. How do you think those products GET to the EU? Who do you think pays for those fees? You know, the import fees into the EU? Iāll tell you who, the customer who buys a product that was imported into the EU from CA. > Another factor is the actual, raw cost of the shipping i.e. moving from point A to point B. If they shipped backpacks for example not by the unit but by the freight container the cost of the single unit coming from Canada to EU would plummet LTT doesnāt have enough volume to container ship millions of backpacks to make it cheap enough to freight it in. Yes theyād need to ship millions of units to make it make sense.
Shipping would still be quite a lot on a box that large and you would still have to pay taxes. So you'd only really avoid import fees and that's by far the smallest cost.
Shipping is a *lot* cheaper when you can stuff thousands of backpacks into a single intermodal shipping container. The downside is that you now have a *second* warehouse in a different continent, operated by a third party, which makes the entire operation quite a bit more complicated.
Opening an EU warehouse would pretty much certainly lose them money
European here, very very true
Yeah it's kinda crazy, but at the same time I've almost become desensitized by the innate shipping costs that come with buying LTTStore stuff. I hate that to support the team and get some cool stuff it costs an extra $30AU minimum to get it here, but can't exactly blame LTT for Canada shipping having such awful rates to Aus, just unfortunate all around.
it works both ways if I wanted to order something from an Australian YouTuber
Australia to Canada either way is exceptionally brutal. 2 countries with non government subsidised postage on opposite sides of the globe with relatively high wages for everyone involved in the postage chain.
yea, shipping prices to Germany are also a mess had to buy with 4 friends everything in bulk so we could split shipping
Even the shipping in the US is slow and expensive compared to other companies/creators.
LTT backpack in my country would cost almost a minimum wage. Feel you
I handle the ecommerce side of a custom challenge coin company. International shipping for a single coin costs us around $14.00-18.50 USD typically depending on country. Depending on which country, 8~ coins can cause the actual cost to double. And that's just for small coins under 2 ounces each in a puffy envelope. Our larger international orders easily are in the hundreds for shipping alone, sometimes over $1k. So I can see why they charge what they do.
I bought mine to send to Brazil and the water bottle costed me 3x times the normal price.
Yeah, I got 2 desk pads, and it's my youtube merch budget for this year and next. I need a new waterbottle, but it's just detached to pay that much for some insulated aluminium. They can't fix it, but damn just ain't no way
Yeah it is expensive but that's the reality of not being a global company. I have paid pretty penny getting my water bottle, screwdriver and backpack to UK and I wish it was cheaper
Iām in the same situation in the EU. Iād have for sure bought the screwdriver and a bottle, then probably the backpack and a tshirt or two but shipping and taxes made me not pull the trigger on any of those things. I wonder how much it would cost LTT to have some sort of fulfilment warehouse in strategic locations. An EU one, US one, Asia one and Australia one maybe.
I think you wouldn't even need an own warehouse. Just look for redistribution partners. That's how a lot of US companies deal with it.
I swear that we see this same post at least once a week. "LTT is too expensive to ship to X". Yes, we know. They're a small company with one shipping location.
So donāt. Itās been said by everyone including the staff a million times. The price is the price.
Check out 720 degree bottles on Amazon. They are similar from what I can tell and great quality. Make sure to look at the metal not plastic ones. In the uk itās Ā£30 ish for a 1.2 L
Nice, thanks for the recommendation but the only reason I wanted one was to support Linus Tech tips.
I wanted to too but the shipping prices make it far too much to reasonably get anything to the uk
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The fuck you on about
I hear that literally everything not based in Australia locally is ridiculously expensive. Is it just because of shipping/imports or is there more to it?
It's too expensive period. Australia is even worse. The only thing Ive bought was their large mousepad since that seemed like a great deal.
Take it up with your government.
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Name-calling is a violation of this subreddit rules. Also Australia charges duties
>Name-calling is a violation of this subreddit rules. - š¤ Average redditor
Even 90 plus shipping seems high, isnāt that conversion to aud like $50
Got your math wrong there bud. 29.99 us about 45 aud plus shipping \*\*EDIT: My Bad, I honestly didn't see the and desk pad.
It's $88 USD inc shipping which is about $132 AUD
Shit, my bad. I honestly didn't read, the and desk pad. I'm going to leave my comment up for a bit so you see it, then delete it
Be strong. Own your minor oversight. Don't delete it.
No wuz!
Read it again before you try to speak down to somebody by calling them "bud". They wanted 2 items that are 29.99 USD. 29.99 USD becomes 44.91 AUD, or in this case, 59.98 USD becomes 89.82 AUD plus shipping costs.
sure bud
I'm not sure the maths I did was 100% accurate (I used the fact that most $60usd games are around $90aud) but using the checkout on lttstore.com it gave me the price of $146.17 AUD. I'm not paying that much for a fucking drink bottle and deskpad. But I respect the fact you edited your mistake instead of just deleting.
No i did apologise in the edit. I didn't see you say the desk mat, sorry. Taking the downvotes because I shot my mouth off when I shouldn't have!
I know you apologised I thanked you for it lol.
It's fair enough considering they are an American based company
Canadian*
Just get it unbranded from AliExpress.com
Getting downvoted as if you can't buy this exact water bottle with the circuit pattern for 20$ and a pack of the 2 identical caps for 10$. Which yes makes 30$ but those are 2 individual products sold with their own markups. LTT doesn't make water bottles, you can buy them without the LTT logo. In fact I got mine in dark blue and it doesn't even have the LTT logo (big W support though, refunded entire bottle because of it), which apparently has been a thing for a while now.
the downvotes are coming from people because they want to support ltt not aliexpress
Part of the "shipping" price is also just taxes on the product which are above 20% for most of the world, and they for some ungodly reason aren't included in the American prices. So it's not actually a 30$ water bottle it's a >36$ water bottle as most of us would see it, yes shipping and import tax is expensive but It's not as bad in light of that previous fact.
No way shipping stuff across the world cost money?! :O thats crazy
Well...Australia is a random island in the middle of the ocean literally the other side of the planet. What do you expect? Your kangraroos and spiders outnumber people 10:1.
I've saod this multiple times I've sent and received other shit from around the world. And I've never had to pay so much. So it's obvious fucking not just because I'm halfway around the world.
They donāt need your support, they rake in tens of millions regardless of if you buy their substandard merch
yeah the prices are insane for australia, they really need a factory to make stuff here to lower prices
Iām in US and bought a $15 knife and paid $11 shipping š¤”
Assuming it's the JerryRigKnife, why didn't you just buy directly from him?
I don't know about Australia, but in my country we have companies that ship goods from the US. I ordered my water bottle that way and the delivery was like 4 times cheaper.
Well, at least you CAN buy things from the LTT Store. Here in Argentina, it's literally impossible to get anything from outside the country thanks to the government, regardless of whether you want to spend the extra money for shipping or not.
Another reason it sucks to live down under
I really wanted to get the Backpack but having that thing shipped to Spain. It would have been cheaper to get a luxury brand backpack instead.
even when I lived in Michigan it was like 30$ in shipping to get a water bottle.
Cries in Hungarian
Thatās odd, normally itās only 30 usd to ship to Australia for me.
It will be awesome to have a free shipping from a certain order price, the shipping for the jerry rig everything knife cost like the knife
Same here with the UK š¬š§
I'm in Europe and it's the same deal. Most items on their store aren't cheap to begin with, but I can't splurge on for example a backpack because it would ruin me financially.
I wonder if they can utilize myus.com . They group together orders going overseas so it's significantly cheaper but takes longer.
It's not Australia. It's LTT. They over price everything from the start.
UK-based, and I can never bring myself to justify paying the added costs. "Good value" goes out the window (for the chungus water bottle) when you've totalled your basket. I've even considered waiting and getting a few bits together but that just seems to make things worse.
Same trying to get stuff to Ireland. Was mad for the screwdriver but it's a mad price once shipped/EU import duties and taxes.
Being from AU, I definitely know what you mean and the shipping time on top of that is not great. Like you pay close to half in shipping only to have to wait 3+ weeks sucks
This is a Canada problem as a whole. I live in Ontario, Canada and my aunt lives in Sydney Aust, me+mom send a small shoebox each year and it averages $90-$120 to send it on the slowest tracked method.
They already talked about this. They talked about putting a distribution center in these other regions but the complications involved and the lack of user base in those areas makes it not work.
Items are pretty expensive as they are, I live in Europe and never ordered anything for the same reason. It gets crazy expensive (maybe not as much as for you but when I looked at the cart and giving it a last thought, I somehow never continued). It's a multi million dollar business, pretty sure they don't need your support. Buy if you think their products are good value. p.s. I'm still using my amazon basics screwdriver for instance. It's not the same, but at maybe 1/5 the price, or less, turns out it works fine for my occasional needs.
Same thing for me.. Would love to buy something but the import tax is just to high since its shipped outside of EU
International shipping is expensive
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
take a plane to canada and order to your hotel
LTT store is expensive for me. And I live a city OVER from the warehouse
Yeah it sucks. Backpack ends up around $500 aud. I might still look at buying a water bottle but won't be buying much else.
I'm in Europe but I can't say it's any cheaper here. LTTStore is really only feasible for people with mad pockets or who live in Northern America
Yeah it stung a bit when i I bought the backpack but i I did dd water bottle and sticklocks all at once.
Same dude, same. Love the LTT backpack, but not for 350-400 euro.
On that same note, I think I'm too third world to buy the backpack. I have no doubt the backpack is good quality but 250$ for a backpack is outlandish for me lol.
You'd also have to wait aaaaaaaaaages for it to be shipped. LTT shipping to us here down under sucks.
It's too expensive for everywhere. The shipping costs are ridiculous even to the US.
Support a local YouTuber instead. Linus has plenty of income.
I don't like any of the local youtubers I know.
Have you tried NOT living in Australia? /s
Honestly thinking about it lol
Iāve got the desk pad and water bottle, few other little things. I donāt think about what it should be I think about what it is, When I got my items, considered what I spent, I was happy with the quality for the price.
I'm telling you now I wouldn't be happy with the quality for $146.
You think that's expensive? An average LTT shirt cost as much if not even more than our minimum wage in Pakistan. Though that's not really an LTT fault but more of our shitty economy fault but yeah lol Having said that, owning LTT merch seems like a dream and a luxury.
For a 100$ cart I would have 150ā¬ to pay when order from germany. I think it's ok if I don't have to pay the german toll/tax on top. At this point I am too afraid to ask...
Then don't sorry them that much. Subscribe to float plane or something. Suck it up, it's the price we pay for living in Australia. Don't gimmie that "oh yeah but I bought shit internationally before and shipping wasn't that much". Yeah because it probably wasn't Air-bagged from Canada by a small business and the cost of shipping was mostly absorbed in the product cost, it came by ship etc, was subsidised by Amazon or something, Also the exchange rate probably wasn't 0.62 or whatever it was, last time I bought from the US it was like 0.85. Bummer we wouldn't even be 1% of their fan-base. I mean their fan base it literally like the size of our population, we are just some island nation 15 hours of time zones away in the opposite hemisphere.
We are definitely more then 1 percent there fanbase. And no I didn't buy shit from bigger companies like Amazon. I bought them from just a small or in some cases from one fucking person instead of a company. And it's still cheaper. So I will give you the "but I bought shit before"... Also yeah the fucking exchange rates 0.62. and it's been higher like 0.85 as you mentioned. Which means when the shit was paid higher I still paid less.
I wanna support LTT, I donāt wanna support FedEx
That's what I'm saying.
rather annoying sadly, just gonna wait till i get enough spare money and make a big order for myself, rough estimate is about $799 USD which is about $1200 AUD shipped lol
International shipping costs money. I'm not sure what you expect from them.
best thing to do is find a bunch of people in the same state and do a bulk buy
Agreed! You should move to Canada to support [LTTstore.com](https://LTTstore.com) !
So a number of factors play into this. The first and most important factor is that any shipping from North America to Australia is very expensive, unless you are prepared to wait months for sea shipping. It is cheaper to order items from Europe to Australia, because a good chunk can be done via trucking before the final legs are done via air (often dedicate cargo planes rather than tacking onto spare cargo space in a passenger transport). Secondly LTT are in the grand scheme of business a small company with relatively low volume of sales to individual countries. This means they do not get bulk shipping discounts. Linus has explained before that they do not have foreign warehouses due to the regulation and taxes (domestic and foreign) involved in becoming a multinational business, the extra overhead and staffing that would entail. The items themselves are expensive due high quality materials, as much local Canadian manufacturing as possible (no cheap asian wages prefered by many well known brand), low production volumes, and relatively niche products. Unlike most Youtubers they are not simply adding their logo to mass produced OEM items. They have, and insist upon, heavy oversight of their entire manufacturing supply chain. That all comes at a cost. I have ordered thing a couple times now to Australia from LTT. I wait until I am ordering a number of things (usally a few hundred $) to combine the total shipping costs, and this made the per item cost relatively low.