Wolfiek Group ships to the USA door-to-door with FedEx and UPS under a Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) model. It’s a fixed fee per sales price, with duties settled at checkout. This is an operation built around the American airgun shooter.
In this story, we’ll find out how it works…
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – Why DDP?
Until recently, buying a high-end PCP from Europe meant accepting one figure nobody could calculate: what the rifle would cost after customs had finished with it.
Some shooters got away with a modest handling charge. Others opened the door to a bill worth a fifth of the purchase. Neither number was displayed when you clicked to complete your purchase.
Delivered Duty Paid changes that for good. The fee shown at the Wolfiek checkout is the real final price you pay. Here’s what a sample checkout page looks like.
Before going further, I’d like to make a comment on that sample $290.00 DDP charge…
I just used ups.com to estimate the cost of shipping a typical air rifle in a package weighing 12 Lbs that’s 50 Inches long, 8 Inches wide and 4 Inches deep from my local UPS Store in New York 14450, to California 90670.
That’s within the contiguous USA so there’s no duty to pay. It’s not a sale so there’s no Sales Tax either. No signature confirmation, no insurance, no packaging, no added services at all and I have to pay for the packaging. Yet the price is $173.40 – yes $173.40 – by UPS Ground shipping. Ouch!
So Wofiek’s DDP price, including packaging, taxes, customs clearance, duties and air shipping all the way from Spain, is actually very fair…
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – What’s In The Order
Wolfiek customers rarely order just one item. More often it’s a complete competition setup.
For example, the shooter who shoots a 100-yard benchrest card in the morning and PRS in the afternoon may buy a Pandora air rifle, a spare valve, two projectile weights and a riflescope.
Inventory management for that kind of order looks different inside the warehouse. There can be many different SKUs to co-ordinate. Maybe there’s a 500 bar Pandora, a tank close to a Liter, a moderator, a scope built for high magnification and several hundred slugs all in one consignment. And they all have different packaging requirements…
So your order may ship in one or more packages, depending on what can safely packed together.
Wolfiek Group takes their gear to the US when their teams attend Extreme Benchrest – above – and the Rocky Mountain Airgun Challenge. What comes back from those trips is not only a scorecard. They also discover which box came off the plane intact, which case cracked, which configuration held up over a full day. It’s all part of the experience.
Back in Barcelona, the packing bench staff pays attention. It’s reflected in how your Wolfiek order is packed.
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – From Barcelona To You
As of today, everything ships from the Wolfiek Group warehouse in Barcelona. The United States is already the company’s biggest market, and every move made so far – the duty-paid DDP model, the domestic return leg, the testing before dispatch – has contributed to making that origin seem just like a local one.
Don’t worry. Your shipment is not going to be Wolfiek’s first rodeo!
Typically, order processing takes a business day – details, payment, legal compliance – and picking and packing add one or two more. Wolfiek Group’s shipping policy allows one to two business days for a general order and up to five for a rifle, since preparation varies by brand and by model before the gun is inspected and shot.
Transit to a US address takes 3-9 business days, often less, tracked from dispatch. Wolfiek says that roughly once a year something ultra-exceptional intervenes – a hurricane, a customs strike, or an airport closed by weather. But such things can occur in purely domestic shipments, too!
The rest of the time, the choice between FedEx and UPS – the two shipping methods available – follows the size, weight, destination and legal requirements of each order rather than a standing preference.
Door-to-door shipping means the courier hands the package over at the address given: there’s no depot, no pickup point, no customs paperwork to handle before you claim your order. The one real restriction is that Wolfiek cannot ship to PO boxes. It must be to a physical address.
Also it’s worth resisting the urge to re-route a shipment by calling the courier directly. A package lost to an uncoordinated change is not refunded – so don’t do that!
Pre-orders follow their own schedule, as published on the appropriate product page.
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – Delivery Duty Paid
Taxes, duties and import charges are all included in the fee charged at purchase. That fee is calculated and displayed on the checkout page, as we saw above. Once it appears there it does not change: it is the only shipping figure in the whole transaction.
Nothing is collected on delivery, no invoice turns up a week later, and no package waits in a depot for you to settle some charge that appears out of the blue. Whatever customs decides along the way has already been paid before the shipment left the warehouse.
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – Returns, Repairs And What Happens Afterwards
Returns are accepted from all fifty states plus Puerto Rico. These returns go to a US address, rather than back to Spain.
But note that a return shipment will follow different rules from the outbound one. DDP covers importing, not exporting, so return shipping and any charge attached to it are the buyer’s, customs included.
Of course, for a full refund, the product needs to come back the way it went out: in its original packaging, complete and with everything in perfect condition. Anything that arrives outside those terms carries a minimum 10% fee. That’s understandable…
Before a return, though, there is usually communication and possibly a repair. If necessary, Wolfiek will ship spare parts. They also offer technical assistance covering setup, maintenance and any questions you have after shooting the first few tins of ammo. Your questions are handled by the same people who inspect rifles before dispatch. All of it is backed by a two-year warranty on new products.
For questions that do not require a person, the group is building a digital technical assistant that’s available around the clock. It’s built on a dedicated database covering the full Wolfiek catalog – air rifles, PCP airguns, pistols, optics, accessories and spare parts. There’s specifications, setup, maintenance and troubleshooting for each product, plus more general information.
This means that questions about the best regulator pressure, parts compatibility or a specification can be checked at the moment it comes up, independently of Barcelona office hours. In a specialist airgun shop, most after-sales questions are resolved with a part, a setting or a piece of technical information. That’s true for Wolfiek too and increasingly it’s not necessary for the ordered products having to be shipped anywhere.
How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA – Who Is Behind The Shipment
Wolfiek Group has existed formally since 2012, on top of earlier years of direct work with PCP manufacturers. The company catalog includes configuration data: which projectile a given barrel prefers, which regulator pressure holds a string together and which combination survives a full competition day.
This “institutional level” knowledge built-up by Wolfiek over the years can help you with your purchase.
The questions the group gets asked reflect their vast customer base. For example, when Wolfiek introduced itself in the HAM Community, one of the first replies came from North Dakota, wanting to know how their products behave in extreme cold!
Your order from the United States includes inspection and test firing before dispatch, two years of warranty on new products, and email or WhatsApp contact for support with the people who did the work. Shipping questions have their own dedicated address, shipping@wolfiekgroup.com
It couldn’t be much easier…
The post From Europe, Duty Paid – How Wolfiek Group Ships To The USA appeared first on Hard Air Magazine.
