Hi everybody!
This post comes from Finland. For those of you who are uncertain where it is I can tell it between Sweden and Russia on the north east side of Baltic sea.
Our country is average size but with only 5 million inhabitants. We have strong economical connections both to East and West, and some Finnish companies like Nokia (communications), Kone (elevators etc.), Wartsila/Masayards (Caribian cruisers) and UPM (forestry) are the leading companies within their industries.
So there is plenty of traffic, material and non-material, in and out from our country.
Considering the lack of decent surf on the Baltic it amazing that we have also 3 surfboard importers, and a Rip curl representant here. I have to give credits to these people who provide us with some necessary equipment with affordable price, and take care of it after their dayjobs. This selection of equipment is considerably good to get everything started, but when a surfer here needs something else, special kind of board or a wetsuit of some certain type he needs to go and buy it somewhere else. Somewhere else means nowadays usually internet. You can find almost anything there.
Except surfboard manufacturers and dealers who ship here at an affordable price. Well, to tell the thruth the biggest problem is to find a online dealer who ships here, or yet alone answers your inquiry about it. Somehow I get the feeling that when selling a surfboard requires answering an email and finding out about shipping costs somewhere outside the country, it already too much work - why do that, there’s enough customers closer by.
Luckily enough there’s some companies that actually have a person who is willing to go through all this trouble to keep the customers happy. But then you come up with another problem - the shipping costs. It seems to me that majority of companies focus on selling inside their own country and have chosen the shipping methods they used based on what it costs for the local customer to get the board delivered at his door the next day. It really is cheap to get a board delivered to your door the next morning for the price of couple of beers. Getting the board delivered to your door which is located in some other country, however, is quite far from being cheap.
I dontmean the local people should pay for our services, but if there was a choice of different shipping methods, we wouldn’t have to pay their services either.
I’ve been in contact to several online dealers in order to buy a certain epoxy surfboard, and all of these dealers use courier services as the one and only method of transporting their good to the customer. The costs of getting the board here vary from 80 to 150€ (that’s 80-150 US) where as the shipping costs inside the country are somewhere between 15 and 25€, depending on the speed. Now, as a carpentry student me and my classmates order quite a lot of materials from outside Finland and also without using any existing massive import channels and I think I have a pretty clear picture of what sending junk around costs. The shipping costs of the material we need in school don’t come even close to those of buying surfing equipment online.
The most wicked thing in getting this certain epoxy board is that the overall cheapest possibility for me to get my hands on the board is to fly personally to UK, buy the board and fly back, paying to get in to the aeroplane.
My overall point which I like tell everybody involved in surfing business is that there are customers outside your country who would like to buy stuff from your company and make their money become your money. The better you serve them, the more they buy. The smaller the shipping costs, the more they buy.
This post is based on my own observations and I have to admit that I have no specific knowledge on shipping contracts or exact expenses on using different transportation methods. If I need to be corrected, I’d be happy if you did that.
masa
Finland
PS. Anybody want to sell me a epoxy Santa Cruz Pumpkin 6’2" can contact me with a message via this forum.