TheAuldGrump said:
With the result that I, at least, stopped buying GW miniatures. I think they were hoping that the online buyers would come to GW directly instead.
The Auld Grump
Unless the "supply chain" is totally outside of the norm, GW's reasons must have been to protect retail stores. On-line only stores still have to buy from a distributor, at the same price a "normal" store would. The only reason an on-line store can give such a steep discount is because they do not have thre tremendous cost of a store front, usually have fewer employees, and can have a higher volume of sales.
They cannot buy the product any cheaper than anyone else, unless they steal it from GW themselves.
The only other way to cut your costs is to meet certain buying plateau's, also called "jobber prices". Say you buy ten boxes of X, you can get them for $50.00 each. If you buy 25 boxes of X you can get them for $43.00 each, and so on.
So the only reason I can see GW doing what they did was to protect their retailers. It did nothing to increase their profit margin. In fact, it may have caused it to drop, if the retail stores did not pick up whatever sales would have been lost due to the on-line stores. LGS's and other retail carriers of GW products are definitely jumping up and down for joy.
Now if they could get WOTC to make Wal Mart and Amazon stop underselling, and pre-selling, their product, they (LGS's) would be ecstatically happy.