LFT orders are processed from various places, depending on where the product has been printed or where it is currently stocked. As you are all aware, LFT products (magazines, FTCs and HASL) are printed in Cambodia for cost effectiveness and quality reasons. As a matter of fact, producing such material in Europe would not be possible for us…Most of the time we keep a decent stock in France and can ship from here; on some product however it can happen that we get out of stock in France and must ship from Cambodia directly to satisfy our customer. Hence it is difficult for us to propose standard or normalized S&H costs.
As a consequence, the process order of LFT is as follows When a customer places an order, the order is registered but not processed immediately. The LFT team will contact back the customer to inform him of the S&H costs, normally within 1 or 2 days.
S&H costs evaluation
In order to give you an idea of how much you can expect to pay in S&H, here are a few guidelines. All prices are indicative only. We buy the shipping and bill it to you in Euros.
FTC and LFT magazines (as well as Tactiques magazines and most BF and HoB products) are rather light and fit into a regular enveloppe. Most of the time, they can be shipped from France. In this case, one magazine (LFT, Tactiques, HoB magazine...) or two FTC copies together would cost around 5 Euros for France, 8 Euros for the rest of Europe and 10 Euros for the US/Canada. If we are out of stock in France and must ship from Cambodia, add 2 Euros for European and non-European shipping.
HASL are different products as they weight much more (usually from 800g to 1.5kg). Shipping from France would typically be 8 Euros for France, 15 to Europe and 20 to 25 Euros to US/Canada. Shipping from Cambodia (a regular occurrence since it is more difficult for us to get large quantities of them back to France) would be 22 Euros for Europe and 24 Euros to US/Canada.
For our Asian customers (we have quite a few now) we usually try to ship from Cambodia, to get them the cheaper rates. LFT would be around 7 Euros S&H and HASL around 18 Euros.
All this prices are true as of July 20th 2011, and are subject to change depending on French and Cambodian postal services as well as to Euro/USD exchange rates. As you can see, it’s not that easy…
In all cases, we highly recommend that ASLers organize themselves to place grouped orders in order to divide the S&H costs and minimize the costs to all of us. Just to be clear, we do NOT put any margin on S&H, we only bill what was billed to us to get the parcel across to you; having different tariffs is as painful to us as it is to you as it has to be managed by the team on an individual basis.
Finally, please note that we bill in Euros. The LFT has not yet extended enough its power across the world to be able to influence conversion rates. In the 2009-2010 period this has been very detrimental to our US fans base in particular, due to very unfavorable US $/Euro conversion. We are very unhappy about this; however there is nothing we can do about it. We advise anyone interested in our products to make his conversions calculations before ordering in order to avoid any surprise at billing time.