Card Shipping Policies
It's not often I get motivated to investigate something in the gaming industry that isn't an actual game. But oddities in where Amazon.co.uk will ship booster boxes of World of Warcraft cards provoked me to go digging. Essentially, Amazon won't ship booster boxes outside the UK. And Amazon.com won't ship them outside the US. And digging further, I find that some retailers in the US can't ship to international customers.
The Wizard's Cupboard FAQ says,
recent Wizards of the Coast policies prohibit us from selling booster packs or booster boxes for any set later than Darksteel outside of the US
And then there's a whole page on adventuresON.com, wherein they say:
Due to a change in the policies of Wizards of the Coast, we are no longer allowed to sell sealed WotC products to non-USA customers.
But that's all Wizards of the Coast products, which WoW:TCG isn't. Anyone know if UDE are operating a similar policy, or if Amazon are just applying that rule to all CCGs? And, uh... why? What's the point of such a policy?
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 15, 2006 11:30 AM
I had a similar problem recently, I had a basket of around 12 items from amazon, due to having one of those days where you wake up and say "fuck saving, I'm bored." But, the buggers wouldn't ship half the items to ireland, pooper games mostly and a wireless keyboard/mouse set.
Posted by: Brucius at November 29, 2006 3:50 PM
Business.
Usually a distributor will look for an exclusive deal for the territory they operate in (and not just in gaming-related businesses), or as close to exclusive as they can get - involving, say, discounts for them, but not for others who manage to get a tow in the door. Which was presumably all fine and dandy before someone invented teh internetz, and in the case of M:tG, I presume suddenly saw drops in sales as ppl started buying online in cheaper territories rather than via the retailers they they supplied. So presumably they went to WotC and cried foul. So WotC went to Amazon (or the US distributor went to Amazon.com and the UK one went to Amazon.co.uk) and said "Stop that or we won't sell to you anymore..."
I could be way off the mark, of course... this is mostly conjecture.
Posted by: Bastun_ie at November 15, 2006 1:31 PM