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I read the forums a lot before placing my first order for a Gladiator NXT EVO, so I tempered myself for a pretty long delay. The site mentions a 2 week lead time which I figure is part of them coming from China. Then it has to get to Netherlands, and then through the Brexit red tape hell of UK customs. I order a lot of things from China generally, so I was fully onboard for a month + before getting this. So imagine my surprise when I order on a Sunday and my stick is at my door the following Wednesday.

There's a lot of negative customer experiences on here and I think that makes it look like that is the only thing going on. I think it's more that happy customers are much less likely to talk about it. So I figured I'd break the trend and balance the scales a little.

Here's a little break down of the cost for a Gladiator for UK buyers as you need to consider VAT and import fees etc:

Gladiator NXT EVO SCG Pro - 181.82 EUR + 15.17 EUR (shipping) = 196.99 EUR

That converts to £170.93 at time of writing + £44.45 (import fees + VAT) = £215.38

Considering the quality of the gear, the speed at which it got here and the general shambles the UK economy is, that aint a bad price at all. Thanks VKB for being one of the few examples in life of where a good deal doesn't have to be a compromise.

Then you for your post. The reason there are many negative reviews here is that 100% of people having issues with shipping or hardware will post about it, but only a small percent of the happy people will write about it . Even if in real charts the percent of negative experience people is really small compared to the positive experience people, this might seem upside down here for these reasons.

Thanks for the feedback. I’m also ordering from the UK and wanted a better idea of delivery.

kundalini wrote:I read the forums a lot before placing my first order for a Gladiator NXT EVO, so I tempered myself for a pretty long delay. The site mentions a 2 week lead time which I figure is part of them coming from China. Then it has to get to Netherlands, and then through the Brexit red tape hell of UK customs.

I'd say that's a worst case scenario - Brexit/UK customs shenanigans aside, since that stuff happens well after VKB ship your product.

One of the points of having a EU warehouse is the ability to keep items in stock to minimize waiting time for the customer - or at least I should think so.

From what I recall, none of my orders from them had to be shipped from China "for me" - except of course for the Evo which was still generally brought in via air freight at that time. Not sure what the situation with the Evo is now, but I thought they would've put it into regular stock by now?


If the stuff you want is in stock in the NL, delivery is pretty damn quick. I just took delivery of a WHT adapter plate that was scheduled to arrive here tomorrow. Ordered it Friday late at night, label was created on Saturday or Sunday and it was shipped on Monday. It probably would've arrived here yesterday but that was a holiday in my region and so it sat in a German UPS warehouse for a day.

Slight caveat: I live only about 80 km away from the Dutch/German border and a little over 200 km from VKB's offices, so my delivery times are probably even faster than for most other EU-customers.


S.