Most liked posts in thread: Retro Lemon - prices now on line.

I’ve just deleted my Lotharek account as he has permanently suspended sales to the U.K.

I’m gonna try The Brewing Academy in the USA and get a FujiNet... while Retro Lemon gets established and has some positive feedback.

 

Retro Lemon is a very well designed web site. Multi-platform products are interesting enough but prices are really far from being cheap or at least attractive or affordable.

 

Good morning everyone,
I am Jakub and it is my first post here, so welcome! I am a founder of Retro Lemon. I would like to address few points that people have made here. I hope that you will find it helpful.

You are spot on here. There are some charges related to import and they need to be paid in Poland and on the UK side, so that is increasing prices slightly. On top of that, we will be offering free shipping in UK, insured to the amount of actual order and always sent by tracked and requiring signature service by Royal Mail.

That is correct, Retro Lemon Ltd has been established for this purpose. I am running another company from 2012 and I live in UK from 2004. Moreover I am related to Atari community from 1995. I am also one of the admins of Atari Area. You can also see my eBay feedback here and here. I hope that shows that I am no man from nowhere.

We are almost there with establishing. The main issue here now is that customs and all the paperwork take longer that we anticipated. We should have some stock last week, but the parcels are still in transit....

Straight to the point. All the imports now will attract VAT payment in many cases. This is not related to the type of product, it is about its origin. Retro machines / gear will be also subject to these I am afraid.

Thanks for your kind words. As explained above prices incorporate postage costs and import charges. I am afraid that this will be the pattern for more and more products incoming to UK, that the prices will be higher. At the moment the choice is to get them imported and make available at a bit higher prices or not get them at all. The main obstacle is that anyone selling to UK, even if they are not established UK business must register for VAT and file VAT returns. If you sell minority of your products in UK it is not attractive at all, especially that prices for accountancy services in UK are higher that for example in Poland. That is the reason why Lotharek has decided to suspend his sales to UK. The same is with people like tmp and his AVG Cart. I think that will be the case with most sellers from outside of UK.

That is exactly what I was refering to above.

You will not be able to, I am afraid. When you send anything to UK you need to declare the origin of the item. It does not matter if it is second hand or new item, the VAT will be applied. And if you send as a private individual, you cannot send with VAT taken off the invoice, as you are not VAT registered.


I hope that above replies make sense. If something is not clear, please post the reply here or contact me in PM.

 

Thanks! I will contact tmp.

 

@nysavant Jakub has let me know he will be selling the AVG cart in the U.K. , same kind of deal as Lotharek. So he will be the sole distributor in the U.K.
He has some on the way as well.

 

That's brilliant news Richie. Might be a while before I can buy as need to get my car sorted out first but will use Jakub for sure.

 

Yes. I'm glad that The Brewing Academy is carrying Lotharek 8-bit upgrades now, IIRC, the list price is slightly higher than Lotharek, but there is big savings in shipping which I think will more than make up for it, and much quicker delivery since it is domestic for me. I've not had an issue with shipping in the U.S. myself, it seems about as fast and reliable as always, but incoming and outgoing international shipping has slowed to a crawl. I finally got my sram Indus GT upgrades, which were sent out December 14th, just arrived. So well over two months. Before the Covid outbreak I could count on packages coming from any place in Europe or the UK to arrive inside a month at least.

About a year ago or so, when I was conversing with Bruce from MyAtari (B&C) via email, he said he was going to retire and was in the middle of a deal with TBA to buy out all his remaining stock. I hope this happens as well, since he gave up on the B&C web store and you can only see the products he has for sail in his MyAtari eBay store, which is a small fraction of full inventory. I guess you have to contact Bruce via email to make an order and transaction for anything not on eBay, I don't know. I don't know if the deal fell through or it was delayed or what, but Bruce is still selling on ebay at the moment.

I really wish Brad at Best Electronics would sell out to TBA or another too, and stop holding Atari products for ransom with specific instructions that must be followed in and order and the ridiculous 3-4 product limit, which costs customers more time and money with having to make separate small orders and pay more shipping for all the separate packages if you want a dozen items. you probably have to wait until one order is shipped before he'll accept a second one too. Such a Dusch-Bag. I, of course, chose to boycott him after receiving the first Dusch-Bag reply from him when I tried to order 8-9 things at once 3 or which were out of stock, which left 5-6 items, but he would only let me choose 3 out of those. And he wanted a new order made up properly by me, with catalog numbers and prices, etc. In other words, be his secretary for my own order!

At least there are some other good dealers out there still, but they just don't have the vintage stock varieties and quantities that MyAtari and Best E. have from when they bought out Atari warehouses and other dealers at the end of the era.

 

I wanted to get a catalogue from Brad but the insane price of postage and how I'm going to be taken to the cleaners this end just meant I never have. Last thing I asked him about was the little rubber half ball mounting fittings for 1050s, he replied and said he had them and it was a couple of bucks for a set but then he hit me with the minimum buy thing, I didn't want anything else so again it never happened..

 

That's exactly how it works, but I wouldn't say our prices are much more expensive. If you consider that you would need to pay VAT and delivery charge from Slovakia, for this instance, you would pay more than at Retro Lemon.

Thanks Allan for these nice words!

For everyone, we have just got new supplier, who is a Retrohax.net. So far, I have revealed one product, that will be available from us, most likely next week. It is Atari Fan printed magazine, issue #1: https://retrolemon.co.uk/atari-fan/132-atari-fan-magazine-issue-1.html. It is developed and printed in Poland, but it is in English, so no worries.

We will have more than this, and it will be revealed over the weekend on or Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/retrolemon.co.uk

 

I had a look on Companies House, and it looks like a new company set up to sell Lothareks products. It was set up on 30/12/2020.

 

I think now we have left the Customs Union totally there is no difference between ordering from the US/Canada, ROW or EU
We will end up paying Customs/VAT and extra handling fees ( Royal Mail is £8 ) or paying VAT at point of sale.
When my FujiNet arrives I’ll let you know how much it cost me...

 

hi Alex,

unfortunately we are now paying import duties from EU countries, although the last time I bought from Lotharek when we were in the EU, I still had to pay 18 Euros post for the 1st item, with an additional 1 Euro for every other Item.

At least I'm not having to pay the Post Office's charge on top of the import charge as well.

Regards

Andy

 

I just had an £8 customs charge for a package from America. Then Parcel Force slapped a £12 surcharge on top of it!

 

That's where I tried to order an AVG cart from, unfortunately they aren't delivering to the UK.

 

Thanks to Jakub for the kind explanation. Although living in Switzerland, I'll keep Retro Lemon in my shopping bookmarks, so when I want to buy some retro gear it'll be surely one of the webshops I take a look at.

 

At the moment, we do not offer posting outside of UK, I am afraid, for the same reasons as people do not offer posting to UK

Yes, that is the plan. At the moment we are looking actively for suppliers, so if you know anyone from outside of UK that would like to have a distribution in UK, please direct them to Retro Lemon. My goal is to get Fujinet and AVG cart (I am a big fan!) ASAP, but it is a bit too early for now.

Yes, second part of the year could be even worse than now... Welcome to Brexit!

 

Hi guys,
I can see the news are spreading. Actually there is a change from yesterday as the parcels have moved according to tracking, so we are close to happy end of the wait

 

HI guys,
We are open! The first parcel arrived today. Two more are expected within this week. Hopefully, we can get more stock soon!

Visit us at www.retrolemon.co.uk

 

I bought a Blitter chip for my 520STFM from best a couple of years ago and got hammered for import charges on top of the very expensive shipping. That were why I was wanting to club in with @Graham for the next time for a new Keyboard but it sounds like that has fallen through. I did email him a couple of weeks ago but he never answered back. These days it’s difficult as you don’t know if California is locked down or non-essential businesses and if he is Okay health wise.
I did get an Atari Basic manual from MyAtari’s Bruce via feeBay, that turned up last week. Was expecting it to be a little bigger but it’s a lot more detailed than the one you got with a 65XE.
I hope they do manage to do a deal to sell the inventory and keep it in the Atari community of sellers.

 

It's certainly not a stunning business model

He's no spring chicken either so he really should sell up, retire and let someone else take the strain...I'm pretty sure in the right hands there's a little goldmine of sales to be had.

 

Nice one Allan, as you know you can't buy it from the EU at the mo so you didn't have a lot of choice and in the end its all in your hands in 2 days..

Have fun, its a BRILLIANT cart..

 

As the FujiNet is in transit, I have more goodies available. Namely: PokeyMax! We have two versions available: Stereo and Stereo + Covox.

Also we have some other new products available for Amiga and Commodore. All of these goodies come from Retrohax.

Feel free to order them through our website:

PokeyMax Stereo: https://retrolemon.co.uk/atari-8bit-upgrades/147-pokeymax-stereo.html

PokeyMax Stereo + Covox: https://retrolemon.co.uk/atari-8bit-upgrades/148-pokeymax-stereo-covox.html

 

The Fujinet looks fun, I like the idea of being able to print direct to pdf.

Tried to order an AVG cart last week but they aren't shipping to the UK either just now

 

But I agree that the FujiNet looks really interesting.

 

Oh I see. Maybe they ship to Italy or Switzerland. In case you need it I can "triangulate" the order (i.e. first ship to me, then I ship to you as if it was an old computer part, just to try and bypass the UK customs taxes... ;-)