Total Wargamer Evesham, a warning.

[DeadPanda]

So fellow gamers I wanted to pass on a warning and tell you about the experiences some of my friends have had with this company.

The company in question is called Total Wargamer and is based in Evesham in the UK. If you have visited the online store you will see that they offer a very generous 30% discount on GAMESWORKSHOP products. They give a stated shipping time of between 5 to 10 days. Now this all sounded too good to be true to me so I dismissed the idea of placing an order. Unfortunately some of my friends did place orders on the 8th of last month. As of yet still no models.
Now you would think a phone call would be an easy fix to find out what is happening. Nope the contact number is answered by a machine which instructs you to email. Email response time is stated as being within 48hrs. Forget it. Try maybe 4-5 days later if your lucky. Your best bet is to leave a post on their Facebook page. This does seem to have some results. My friends did this and both received emails stating they had dispatched their items. This was over a week ago.
Despite giving reasons of Internet outage and a mix up of order priorities non of my friends have received the goods.
I did a bit of poking around on the Internet and googled the company and found these were not isolated instances and Total Wargamer has even been featured on consumer watchdog sites in regards to its poor customer services. Some of which dates back to 2011.
Where were at now is still no models and letters are being written to trading standards and their suppliers GAMESWORKSHOP. As it happens DeadPanda here has some business in Stratford (near Evesham)in a weeks time and I have offered to go on person to see if I can help resolve the issues.
I wanted to pass these experiences onto you my friends so you too don't fall foul of this badly run business.

[Denzark]

Is this the company that mysteriously arose from the ashes of maelsrom games, with the same website and price structure, just a new name?

[Wolfshade]

No, they are different.

I have used them several times with vastly different experiances.

Some orders arrive next day, some after a month. I think part of the issue is their stock management and that they may not always have everything in stock that they claim and so order it the next thursday and that leads to delays.

In the end one of my orders came from GW direct.

Interestingly when I have ordered non-GW stuff from them (paints) I've had no dleays.

[Wolfshade]

A mate of mine who also use them have had similiar experiances.

It is a great discount, but if you want it quickly, probably not the most reliable.

[Brakkart]

My brother ordered a Drop Pod from them back in early January during one of their supposed 30% off weekends as a birthday present for me. It never arrived and by late February he ended up buying me something different from the local games store and asking them for his money back. To the best of my knowledge he has still not received either the Drop Pod or his refund to date. I would advise anyone ordering from them not to bother.

I can highly recommend Dark Sphere (http://www.darksphere.co.uk/index.php) as a web retailer with a good range of products (GW and others), decent discounts and fast turn around on orders. They even had tracking on my order and for a P&P fee of just over £3.

EDIT (11th May 2013): Heh the Drop Pod my Brother ordered back on the 13th January arrived yesterday, months late and after he had cancelled the order and received a refund.