UK hardware purchasing

[Andy Greaves]

Hello,

This is aimed mainly at any UK installers. I wanted to pass on my recent experience of purchasing hardware from a European distributor.
I’ve ordered direct from CF in the past, but the import duty applied starts to make the hardware very expensive.

I spoke to Aaron regarding this and he passed me contact details for Bram van der Mooren at Heuff in Netherlands.
I got a price list and sure enough, it works out cheaper to order via Heuff than it does to get stung by the import duty.

Now it wasn’t entirely straight forward as I’m sure Bram would agree, but we got there in the end and I’m sure the next order we place will be very easy.

The problems I had were firstly that their website is not entirely in English, there are parts that are English and parts that are not. It’s not a huge problem as you can generally work out what you are doing, but something to be aware of.

The second issue I had which was partly with Heuff and partly with our own setup, is that Heuff cannot take card payments outside their own country and they also do not take paypal. So this meant it needed to be an international transfer which is where our own problems caused delays as to do a simple transfer on a supposedly common market place is incredibly difficult and long winded if you happen to bank with Co-operative!
If you don’t suffer this problem then the whole thing is a doddle!

So what we did in the end, was provide our list of items required, Heuff then issued a pro-forma invoice. I then went through the process of making the payment and the stuff was shipped.

So apart from the transfer being a pain, the whole thing is very easy and what made me persist was that Bram and the other Heuff staff I had contact with were incredibly helpful and were doing everything they could to make the transaction as painless as possible.

I will definitely use them again now that the process is known and of course it’s cheaper for us than ordering direct so the hardware becomes even more competitive against other brands.

Thanks for all your help with the first order Bram and no doubt we will speak again soon.

I have no connection with Heuff apart from making this first order with them, I wrote this hoping it may help any other UK installers who feel the pain of having to give money away to HMRC for seemingly no reason!

Web - heuff.nl

Andy.

[Jarrod Bell]

Thanks for the detailed writeup Andy. Great to hear that Bram and the team at Heuff will go the extra mile for you guys in the UK.

Regards,

Jarrod Bell
CommandFusion
www.commandfusion.com