Sunday, April 17, 2011

New British Rifle and Line decals from Alban Miniatures

If you follow this blog you might recall my trying to buy Alban's 28mm decals a while back.

As Alban said at the time:
The problem lay with the supplier. He appears to have lost interest in producing decals. So supplies were patchy. We are working on an "in house" solution at the moment. I'm afraid that it would be premature to give a time frame.

We want to get these going again as they are a very good seller.

Well Alban have now released the new decals:
We have improved our rifle decals and the new code DE1.1 Rifle Decals are on sale now. Each decal sheet contains 50 back-pack and canteen decals for the 95th and 60th rifles.

These decals have been researched by Alban and designed by Juicy Lime Studio’s designer ‘David Watts’ exclusively for Alban. The decal designs were then shipped down to Cornwall for white ink printing and ‘hey presto… New improved rifle decals’.

These are available at just £2.50 per pack + P&P.

We hope you like the final product of our efforts here at Alban Miniatures.

Great news and these decals will make a great addon to your figures, a nice bit of easy to apply detailing.

However when I tried to buy them from their online store earlier today there was a small glitch in the shopping cart and it was adding 1.00 GBP over and above the actual cost, I have notified them so I am sure it will be fixed soon.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. You will find that the £1 is the Alban standard handling fee that goes on to all of its post outs to cover admin, packaging and offset the increase in postage prices.
It is to encourage larger purchases in order to make postage worth while and offset the ever increasing logistics costs of running a small internet/postal based business.
I would advise customers to just look at what they want and buy it all in one hit. This saves the customer money as the £1 is a one off charge and so is spread between the products purchased. Alban works on the premise that bulk is better.
Cheers,
Paul L.

Rob Edgar said...

Fair enough, actually I don't really have a quibble with the level of charges which don't seem to bad IF you can at least buy one of each set of decals.

However at the moment if you choose one of each of the decal sets and then get through to Paypal to make the payment only then it tells you that set DE2 is out of stock, (even then that is very hard to spot).

So currently you can only by the one set and to be honest the decals is the one item on the site where a lot (most???) customers will only buy the one item because the fairly unique Alban style of sculpting is not compatible with their figures so they wont be interested in anything else.

Anyhow I think it might be useful to actually mention the admin charge before hand, as it is very counter intuitive having clicked a button that says "GBP2.90 including world-wide postage" you get presented with a bill for GBP3.90, and even if you might think GBP3.90 is a fair price you still go 'hmm smtg not right here'.

It's not a big deal after all its only a quid we are talking about it and I can't even get a cup of coffee for that, just could be a bit more user friendly.

Rob Edgar said...

FWIW I have just ordered my GBP3.90 worth of Rifle decals :)

When I get them I will put some pics up of my rifles, i think they deserve one extra dice for the decals dont you think.

Anonymous said...

Cheers Rob. If you copy your pic to our Alban facebook site we may even use it on our Alban site. Regarding the £1 I know that cost is a bugbear for many in these times of austerity but we are upfront about it on the Alban site... It is on the shipping page which tells you all about our pricing structure.
Be sure to let me know how you find the new decals compared to our last ones.
Cheers,
PL

Rob Edgar said...

No problem Paul, will do.

Now all you need is to get some line decals, actually some Cacadores decals would be nice as well (because I have just bought some figures from Victrix) although they don't really tie in with any Alban miniatures.

You're right the charge is mentioned on the shipping page, it's just that given that the decal page is so explicit about the shipping cost it doesn't occur to the average guy that he needs to go look at shipping to figure out there is another cost to be added in.

It's not a big deal time to move on.