cmtrain

Don't think that will work? if x manufacturer with a UK warehouse receives a shipment of its latest locomotive, would that be at cost price? As mentioned above not all are imported to the UK and there are more than just the 2 big players. You may be better off looking at revenue accounts for the all the big manufacturers.

Ooo another unofficial post coming up (I'm responsible for Rails of Sheffield's ecommerce). Since I started at Rails 5 years ago and first experienced the model Railway hobby I have seen the industry grow, I have seen new manufacturers come to the industry and I visited shows where I was amazed by the number of people I saw. While I'm not a Model Railway hobbyist I do like to roll dice and push toy soldiers around a table and did witness our yearly local wargames show close. This was not due to lack of demand for the hobby but more a lack of transition from the old guard of the local wargames club for whom it was an increasing hassle to put the show on to the younger members that could carry the show on and take it forward. Now several years later I'm knee deep in toy soldiers and my wife is getting increasingly annoyed... that industry is stronger than ever and has similar issues with 3d printing and technology. I see both recent sad news events as being caused by unfortunate 'local' factors specific to them rather than industry wide issues. Enjoy your hobby. Regards Chris

Writing In a non official capacity (I manage Rails of Sheffield's Ecommerce), I just wanted to whish all the Hatton's team all the best for the future. I have been made redundant several times in my IT/Software carrier and it is always rubbish and highly stressful, I hope the team there can use the situation to springboard on to better things and prosperity in the future. I must also commend Richard for winding down the company in a responsible way and not leaving with debts and causing problems at suppliers. When I started at Rails nearly 5 years ago now I remember chatting with John and he spoke of how progressive Richard was, how much he genuinely wanted to push the industry forward. He and Hatton's will be missed :( Regards Chris

Hello, We do try and limit emails, however there are often multiple things going on and often unexpected announcements happen after we have already sent out an email that day. It is something we hope to continue to improve and aim to keep our customers informed of the industry goings on in the least amount of emails possible. Having said that you should not be getting that many emails from us - we have sent 12 emails so far in January, averaging under 2 a day and have not sent more than 2 a day? We do give our mailing list members a unique special offer every month and have some releases/offers that are available to our mailing list members first so we think being on it is definitely worthwhile and we are always looking to bring more value to our members which we hope to do in the coming year. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Hello there! Sorry its not appearing for you, I don't think we would engage in gambling which requires you to wage something of value rather than a bit of free fun which is the intent behind the spinner. I set the spinner to appear 4 seconds after page load (on all pages), that it has not loaded and that the mascot side icon is not appearing would suggest something blocking popups or script? What device and browser are you using? is there another internet capable device you could use to try? It worked on all our test setups, I know some anti virus can be a bit overly keen sometimes but given the amount of devices, software and software versions there are it is an impossible task. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

https://railsofsheffield.com/collections/rails-connect Or if you search Rails Connect the products should also appear. I will see if I can sort a redirect. Kind Regards Chris Rails Ecommerce

It does not, the price being displayed in NZ does not include UK tax First image is from UK, second is from New Zealand. Where it is saying Tax included it is correct as no more tax is added to price at checkout, we will look in to changing wording or maybe it would be less confusing if we removed the tax included form non UK visitors. Does that explain your issue Robbie? Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

I do have notifications turned on but it may take me a bit of time to respond sometimes. Hi Robbie, *EDIT* I did mention a bug here but I misunderstood and that bug is only applicable for phone orders Ill explain what is happening below Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

Hi Mark, Msg me with your email address and I will take a look at your pre-orders and try and see what's wrong. There's no migration issues that I know off, just a very rare bug that stops a hand full of people from viewing their pre-orders. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

Everyone should be able to see there pre-orders on the new website. Please contact us if not and we will take a look and deal with any issues. We are constantly aiming to improve the website and pre-order experience and hope to publish a range of improvements soon. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

I believe this is the first time we have done a sitewide discount and we wanted to make sure there's something for all our customers. If you want to double dip on discount check out our bargains section. Also spend over £80 and the discount covers the £4 standard postage (on items that are not postage free). Happy Shopping! Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Apologies I missed replies to this thread, must not have notifications turned on, so sorry for my silence. Hello, Worldwide payments have always been an issue and have become more so in the last couple of years. We are limited in what levers we can pull in regards to banks and our payment gateways rejecting payments, we have been looking in to this and are trying to make transactions with our customers outside the UK less problematic. We are constantly working on new updates some of which should come to fruition soon... Hello, Sorry to hear about that, was the duplicate order your error or was there something we could have done differently to help stop that happening? Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

Hello, If your account was not auto copied over then creating a new account with the same email is exactly the same. As I previously mentioned unfortunately not all accounts could be copied over though we did manage 90% of accounts chosen. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

It links up using Email, could you pm me you email address and name, ill take a look. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Hello, Sorry to hear about your problems, not all accounts could be transferred automatically (more than 90% were done). If it's one of those accounts that could not be transferred, you just need to sign up with the same email that you used for the old account and it will be fine. Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Hello 1. Currently not, though we plan to add more features to enable similar functionality to the old system in this regard. Currently If a card needs to be changed you can call up our customer service team and they can sort that for you. 2. When an order line on the pre-order screen is fulfilled it will disappear and be dispatched by the old system. The aim is to get all pre-orders being dispatched by the new system so they benefit from tracking and would appear in your orders. We are working towards this. Apologies for any inconveniences caused while we transition to get everything working optimally, none of this should effect delivery of your pre-orders and as I always stress we have not lost or changed any of your pre-order data. Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Hello, Not a silly question, while that information is not part of the new website, we still have it for potential future use. Kind Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

In what has been a few weeks of great change we wanted to give everyone an update on how things are going with the switch over and outstanding issues. We have not just upgraded to a new website but a new warehousing and dispatch system. Previously the customer service team had been performing heroics manually typing in every address from our system into our shipping partners system and printing off the labels. As our growth has continued the last few years this was becoming increasingly untenable and with covid limiting our options to hire more staff due to space restrictions this change was much needed. We thank you for all your kind emails and for the help in pointing out the odd wrinkle in the new system. We have already fixed several minor issues and will continue to work hard to try and provide the best website experience in the hobby. Pre-Orders Outstanding Pre-orders are shown in the Pre-Orders tab in the Pre-Order section. Going forward any open orders from the old website not shipped out will now also appear in this section. Wish lists The data is almost complete and hopefully will be imported before the end of this week. Customer credit We are now using gifts vouchers for customer credit. If you would like to use a gift voucher for a pre-order you will need to do this over the phone. If you have customer credit you can still use this on pre-orders. If you would like to transfer your customer credit to a gift voucher please get in touch with our customer service team. Chris Ecommerce Rails Of Sheffield

Hi Ian, The team are working hard to ship out existing open orders on the old system as fast as they can when items come into stock, as you can imagine we are keen to send them out as soon as possible. If you want any information about a specific order please contact our customer service team and they should be able to help you out with any queries. Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

Hello, you have no need to be worried, no data has been changed or lost. Any issues with the Pre-order Tab not showing some pre-orders is visual only. Having said that we are currently not aware of any issues with this after we fixed an issue earlier in the week. The pre-order Tab only shows open orders for products that were purchased when in a pre-order state. It does not show shipped or non pre-orders. We do not expect you to have to chase up orders, but with many thousands of pre-orders we did anticipate we may have the odd minor issue and advice to contact customer service is for your piece of mind. We are sorry we have not met your expectations, we have had to make lots of difficult decisions and such things are never straight forward. Finally, I should stress this is just the beginning of our plans to improve our website offering and not the end. Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

If you create an account with the same email address as your existing rails account that should show you any existing open pre-orders in the pre-order tab. The activate account email isn't necessary and some accounts were difficult to directly copy in, so not everyone got an activation email. Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

Currently new pre-order purchase confirmations are not being sent, this is an issue high on the priority list. you can check your order has gone through alright by looking on the pre-orders tab. Issues with pre-order tab not showing all pre orders has been fixed. (contact us if not) It would have been preferable to transfer orders from old to new but with two very different data structures and a fair amount of part complete orders it was not practical. We will endeavour to fix any bugs quickly and hopefully any issues will not hamper your enjoyment of the hobby. Nothing has been changed or deleted, your old orders are still exactly the same in the old system which is still operating to ship existing orders and pre-orders out. Any queries regarding outstanding orders please contact our customer service team. Regards Chris Ecommerce Rails of Sheffield

I have a few friends that work in a few different sectors of online retail, cancelling potentially hundreds of orders is a massive pain... to then manually allocate stock of another product would be even more so. They are not going to make big money on the low price and limited run of the Hornby coaches, I imagine they have already lost money on designing their coach! Still its sad people have missed out :( Doesn't seem like Rails want to compete with Hornby or any manufacturer, just produce the more niche products or fill gaps in the market that would not otherwise get produced.