When it’s Best to Buy British

So as we all know the pound isn’t particularly strong at the moment, which means those days spent buying cheap boards from European online retailers are over. To save our readers a bit of time this coming season we’ve done our own price comparison to see where the best country to buy a board is at the moment.

For this comparison we used two boards from the 09/10 season, the new Burton Custom and the K2 Slayblade. To conduct our evil experiment we researched the average price from three of the most popular online retailers in the UK, Europe and US. Our research found that unsurprisingly the US was still the cheapest place to buy a board, but not if you live within the EU, and the UK is significantly cheaper than mainland Europe, or Euroland as we like to call it.

Burton Custom:

If you were to buy a Burton Custom in the States and have it shipped back to the UK or Europe then you’d be looking at postage and import duty fees of over $200 (around £126) which takes the price to over £490 (€ 530+)……which is just cheaper than buying it in mainland Europe but more expensive than the UK.

If you live in the UK or in mainland Europe then the cheapest place to buy a board is the UK where you can expect to pay £470 (€ 508), which is over €40 cheaper than mainland Europe providing you get free postage and packaging. Not massive saving as it seems that once again Burton have successfully adjusted their prices to avoid people going international to find a bargain. However, the UK has seen the price of a Custom rise by over 13% this season, which moves it in competition with the likes of the Amplid HiDef and the K2 Zero… can it compete with these boards? Maybe?

K2 Slayblade:

The Slayblade is a different entity all together. This season you can pick up the Slayblade for £400 (€435) in the UK, in the US you’re looking at paying $550 which is approximately £350 add postage and charges and you’re well over £400. In Europe, most of the prices we’ve seen for the Slayblade is €570! So if you’re in Europe and you want to get this years Slayblade you could save up to €135 by purchasing it from a UK store.

Posted by Tom Ewbank in Blog & News.