Don't Buy The Magnet! Just Kidding... Sort Of

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We have limited Magnet quantities of Magnets prepped and available in the store. To keep load on the server and the warehouse manageable, we’re sending out emails to our mailing list in small batches. If you haven’t seen an email about this, you will eventually, so don’t worry.

I say “prepped” because there are a number of physical checks we do on every Magnet to make sure mechanicals are tightened and operation is smooth. And we make one upgrade to the rubber grips in-house which Kickstarter backers can perform on their own if they want. You can learn about that in the Magnet help section:

These checks take significant time per Magnet, so it’s not as simple as just opening up a crate of them and shipping them out. But not to worry — if we run out of this batch we can prep more and it won’t take months. Just stay tuned to the mailing list.

The Kickstarter campaign had a sizable number of international backers, so this time we’re incorporating an international shipping service called Passport Shipping. Passport lets you pay everything up front, including your local taxes in whatever country you live in, with no extra fees on delivery. The complexity of this means that up until recently, this is not something most small online stores could offer.

No matter how you pay it, international shipping isn’t cheap. And local taxes like the standard 20% VAT in the UK are often levied on top of the shipping cost. So getting a Magnet across the ocean comes at a premium. We’ve just tried to make that process as easy as possible.

The bigger question: Do you actually need a Magnet?

The most common issues we diagnose in Technique Critique have to do with learning to perform picking motions in a way that is fast and feels easy. For problems like this, the Magnet mainly confirms things that are already obvious: the motion is stringhopping, the motion is fatiguing, the attack doesn’t feel smooth, etc. So you don’t need to wait for a Magnet to know that these things are happening, or to know what to do about them. Instead, get those joint motion tests happening, get the numbers up, get your basic form from the tutorials, etc. If you run into trouble make a Critique on the platform, we’re happy to take a look.

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Hi Troy, I wana buy one if any left, just wondering, do you know if i’ll have to pay extra being in the UK?
I been hit with extra charges before buying from the evh site and jason becker. Both US ofcourse. But I want one.

I know you’ve typed about it, tho just wondering if you know the ultimate price to get one here?

And my answer is yes I need one cus it’s cool as hell.

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Any purchases to the UK incur the standard 20% VAT. It’s the same VAT you would pay in the store so there’s nothing extra there. The only difference is when you pay it. The way we have it set up, you pay it all during checkout and that’s it — it just shows up at your door. This is thanks to Passport Shipping who functions as the intermediary and submits the VAT on your/our behalf.

I don’t know how the EVH site or Jason Becker site do it, but if you had to pay VAT when the item showed up, then it wasn’t really “extra”. It was just the VAT you would normally pay, but you didn’t pay it when you did the checkout in their online stores.

This is understandable. It’s impossible for a US business to collect and pay local taxes for every country around the world. Even just doing this for one large region like the EU is prohibitive with the different and ever-changing rules you would need to track. Then you throw in non-EU like the UK, Norway, Turkey, etc. Forget it.

There’s one other gotcha will you also not have to worry about in our store, and that’s “brokerage fees” charged by carriers. FedEx and UPS both charge a fee — in addition to VAT — for filing the customs paperwork in your country. They don’t like to mention this up front and there’s no way to avoid it. If you use these carriers, you will have to pay this fee when the item arrives and it’s not cheap. DHL doesn’t charge this — one of the many reasons they’re great. However, they’re also not cheap.

Anyway you don’t have to worry about any of this shopping in our store. Pay once, done. It took us a bunch of work to set this up but so far it seems to be working.

Edit: If you want to see the price to get it to you, all in, just put one your cart and type your address. You don’t even have to complete the check out. The price displayed is the price you will pay!

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well fuck it man i’ll buy it. Love your work n everyone on the forum. Be a gift to myself :smiley:

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Really trying to supress my contrarian urges, am I the only person here more likely to buy it because Troy said “don’t buy it”?

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Got mine yesterday gonna try it out later today. I just had to have one.

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Sold! Thank you, Troy and CTC team!

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BOUGHT!
(had to pay almost twice the price for shipping to Poland but screw it)

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FINALLY! thank you so much!!!

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Last year I went on a Pick quest. I have gone from Delrin light picks (for 3 decades!) to various materials in thicker, 3- 5mm with beveled edges and angled points. I’m waiting for The Magnet so I can make some videos for my website and students. I might learn something as well!

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Lovely surprise arrived while away

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out of stock now? :open_mouth: looking forward to getting mine :smiley:

same mate, but hopefully it’ll last a long time and it is one of the only true accessories for technique freaks like us dispite what troy says lol I’ll deff make use of it in my guitar obsession.

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I need a restock to order mine! :slight_smile:

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Did you get your one shipped? Looks like mine is stuck on the same stage for more than a week already

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Checking with Passport on this.

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I don’t know what you did Troy, but I just got an email that my package is being exported, and indeed!
Screenshot from 2024-03-14 00-30-39
Thanks!

He probably sent them a 270bpm picking video and scared them into fast-tracking the order :wink:

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No picking intimidation needed! I emailed Passport support on this and they replied just now and said the order was still in transit to Passport facilities. They also said that there is typically a delay of up to a week during that stage.

I’ve noticed in our test orders that there is a delay from when our warehouse prints out the label — which generates the tracking email — to when Passport says they received it at their hub. I’m not sure why this is.

Is it because the warehouse is only sending out Passport batches every certain number of days? Or is it because Passport is only processing them every certain number of days? And so on. I’ll try to get more color as to what’s happening at this stage.

@jptk Did you get a tracking update on this as well?

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