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I remember when all you had to do was email customer service for GW and they would take care of any missing or damaged items. I remember at times maybe having to provide a copy of a sales receipt.

Recently I reached out as I had a second larger kit missing a very minor part. I had the Indominus box set come in, I had ordered it from a online retailer and it was missing the plain Librarian shoulder pad. I emailed GW and they asked for a sales receipt so I sent it. They advised me that I had to contact the seller to arrange an exchange. I contacted the seller and ofcourse they didn't have any other copies but they advised they would refund my money if I sent it back. I wasn't going to send the whole set back for a simple missing part so I just ignored it.

In my Orks boarding patrol I purchased awhile back, my Flash Gits were missing the 3 barrel gun end bit. I just didn't use that gun barrel.

But still is this becoming the norm, since GW started to do stuff in house? Is missing parts now a thing? GW said they only will replace parts if it is directly ordered from them. In these limited release sets like Boarding Patrol or even Indominus which you have to pre order and pay for there is no way for independent retailers to get additional copies incase there is any issues with their orders, they already have an impossible time getting those sets to begin with, especially with all the caps.

Has anyone else noticed issues with their orders since GW went in house? seems their quality control is lacking and customer service abysmal.

Not really sure what you mean with "since they went in house", as far as I know GW always produced in house, the exception being some terrain and books from China.

Not sure it's an overall trend, but since they can barely keep up their production to fulfil demand maybe it's harder for them to do these replacements.

It isn't abysmal customer service for you to have to return a purchase to the retailer that you actually purchased it from.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Not really sure what you mean with "since they went in house", as far as I know GW always produced in house, the exception being some terrain and books from China.

Not sure it's an overall trend, but since they can barely keep up their production to fulfil demand maybe it's harder for them to do these replacements.

Them doing everything in their location now is what I meant. I have bought thousands of kits and maybe had once prior where there was an issue. Now I had 2 of the last 4 boxes I bought with issues, granted they are small issues but makes me wonder if their quality control is suffering.

They stopped directly dealing with product issues from third party sales at least a decade ago, to stop people from buying 2nd hand stuff off eBay and then going to them for missing parts. That's not really uncommon, though - for retail in general, issues with something you bought are generally resolved at the place of sale, not directly with the manufacturer.

As above, though, I'm not sure what you mean by them 'going in house'... their customer service and the majority of their manufacturing has always been in house.

As a comparison, I had a local FLGS refer me directly to Mantic after I had a box of some stuff missing a part.

For a very minor part, I cannot understand why HQ wouldn't have 10 opened boxes of Leviathan or whatever thats been opened for demo minis, staff kits or whatever, and why the customer service troll wouldn't just go and grab one and pop it in an envelope.
GW have got a reputation for having excellent customer service so wonder if just got someone at the wrong time of day? And having worked in customer services previously, when you are on the front lines and basically cannon fodder for whichever, sometimes really rude AH on the phone demanding everything (absolutely not saying the case here, but they have probably had calls like that throughout the day) I do have some sympathy for them dropping the ball sometimes.

GW customer service used to be absolutely excellent, nowadays it's "only" okay-to-good.

It's purely anecdotal, but from what I've gathered at some point they made the choice to not be so generous after they got taken for a ride by one too many people

I've heard many stories over the years on Dakka, Warseer and elsewhere, where GW have replaced whole kits due to minor imperfections on a single component. A few stick out to me: they guy who had his whole Rhino replaced 4 times because there was a small indentation on the rear door, the multiple people who had a whole starter set replaced due to small miscasts on a single sprue, that kind of thing.

But the one that stands out the most to me was somebody on this very site who purchased a Forge World Inn. If you've ever seen one of these it comes in three main parts, each is a massive floor of a building. It's in the nature of resin to warp slightly, especially very large parts. You can use boiling water or a hairdryer to correct the warping. This guy refused to accept the slight warpage and kept getting FW customer service to send him replacement floors.

In the end he was boasting about having an eight storey high buiding due to the "free" floors he was being given. This broke my heart a little, as it was no doubt one of the reasons that they pulled the model from sale when they did, and at the time I didn't have the money to buy one.

Given the size of the FW Inn, I doubt that FW made much/any profit on it in the end.

Edit: I also have no idea what OP means by GW "going in house", I'm going to assume that they were getting a little mixed up, like we all do from time to time.

Yeah some people take pride in getting free stuff from "big" firms through fake replacement/fault reports and getting free product that way. It doesn't take many people like that when you deal with a big market for it to start impacting your company.

Even worse these days is that the internet can allow that kind of person to encourage others. Heck get one semipopular youtuber and they can "influence" some really bad behaviour/practice/attitudes in a very short span of time.


So GW tightening things down a bit makes a lot of sense; esp when their general policy isn't to send out parts but replace whole kits; because they just send it through as a £0 order.




Part of this is because plastic is cast as a single sprue that's then boxed up. It's not like the metal days when parts are in pots nad staff have to individually pick out parts so you can get misspacks (heck firms often have to learn to put number cards in the packs to try and track individual staff packing and error rates to spot if there's a pattern - eg a model that everyone packs wrong or a staffer packing poorly).

So GW just doesn't have boxes of spare sprue laying around to clip parts off.



Plus missing parts should honestly be really rare with how plastic casting and packing happens. It should be more common that the part is in the box or came loose and is pinned by another part in the box rather than just flat out not there are all.




As for In-House - Gw are famously very in-house. Almost everything they make is produces in Nottingham barring their terrain plastics and a few others; and their cardstock*



*they've apparently looked at doing cardstock internally, but I think the core issue is that the UK just doesn't do much paper production in general so there isn't the skillbase; nor the supply chains in place to make it affordable/easy to do compared to ordering bulk from China/India

Well, back in the day- that being a year with a 1 in front of it, I bought a WHFB wraith pack and it was missing the scythe top. I got ahold of GW and they were like "What do you want us to do about it?" I guess it'd kinda be petty to ask to send such a small part in thier big troll box, but then it'd be petty of them not to give me such a small and important piece. I ended up using a plastic one from the skeleton kit.

So, I may have gotten ahold of them on a bad day, but later, I bought a pack of death cult assassins and it was totally miscast, where the mold slipped. I was ready to return it, but they didn't do squat again- acted like it was my fault for buying it and not spotting it in the blister.. Which only shows one side of the mini!

Only good thing was once I got a sister of battle mini I didn't order, and again- I was ready to return it, but they were like "That's our screw-up, keep it no charge!".. So, I can only guess someone else was missing a battle sister..

 TheChrispyOne wrote:

Well, back in the day- that being a year with a 1 in front of it, I bought a WHFB wraith pack and it was missing the scythe top. I got ahold of GW and they were like "What do you want us to do about it?" I guess it'd kinda be petty to ask to send such a small part in thier big troll box, but then it'd be petty of them not to give me such a small and important piece. I ended up using a plastic one from the skeleton kit.

So, I may have gotten ahold of them on a bad day, but later, I bought a pack of death cult assassins and it was totally miscast, where the mold slipped. I was ready to return it, but they didn't do squat again- acted like it was my fault for buying it and not spotting it in the blister.. Which only shows one side of the mini!

Only good thing was once I got a sister of battle mini I didn't order, and again- I was ready to return it, but they were like "That's our screw-up, keep it no charge!".. So, I can only guess someone else was missing a battle sister..

GW UK is certainly the best of the best of GW. I've heard that overseas can vary a fair bit more due to different hiring and training policies. EG in the UK most GW shop staff are basically geeks who get paid to be in the shop and be salesmen too. Whilst my impression of the USA hiring and training process (esp under Kirby, I'm led to believe its improved since then) they were very much hard sales people first and foremost.

 TheChrispyOne wrote:

Well, back in the day- that being a year with a 1 in front of it, I bought a WHFB wraith pack and it was missing the scythe top. I got ahold of GW and they were like "What do you want us to do about it?" I guess it'd kinda be petty to ask to send such a small part in thier big troll box, but then it'd be petty of them not to give me such a small and important piece. I ended up using a plastic one from the skeleton kit.

That's the kind of answer that I'd expect from a GW retail employee during the 1980's and '90's, I remember Young Me being on the withering end of a filthy look when I asked one of them a simple question ... but I certainly wouldn't expect that sort of thing from their customer service, ever.

 TheChrispyOne wrote:
So, I may have gotten ahold of them on a bad day, but later, I bought a pack of death cult assassins and it was totally miscast, where the mold slipped. I was ready to return it, but they didn't do squat again- acted like it was my fault for buying it and not spotting it in the blister.. Which only shows one side of the mini!

This was Finecast, I assume? They dropped the ball with Finecast in every way possible. But still, they were happy to give replacements if you got a bad cast, so your experiences seem to be in sharp contrast to others? Maybe I'm not understanding the context, I've been assuming that you had contacted customer services when you said that you "got hold of them", but I guess you might mean that you spoke to somebody at store level?

 TheChrispyOne wrote:
Only good thing was once I got a sister of battle mini I didn't order, and again- I was ready to return it, but they were like "That's our screw-up, keep it no charge!".. So, I can only guess someone else was missing a battle sister..

That's not surprising, it would have prolly cost more for them to pay for shipping than what the mini cost.


I've just realised, I haven't even looked at your flag displayed by your username, I was assuming tha you lived in the UK. If you live in another country it might explain your bad experiences: I have no knowledge of how customer services overseas operate.




Edit: I've just seen that you are in the USA, that explains the differences!

Been yonks since I had cause to return anything to GW.

Time was you typically just needed your receipt, and a replacement would be sorted. Memorable one for me would be when the soon-to-be-retired Gaunt box came out. When you got Termies and Hormies. The two I bought only had one of them (I forget which). GW gave me two new boxes, and that was that - but I did have to provide a receipt.

But that’s a looong time ago. Easily 20+ years ago.

During my till monkey days, we had a book to fill out as staff. Nothing too strenuous. Just the batch code and date of return etc.

Asking the selling store to sort it out is hardly a burden. Whether drop off in-store or posting back, it’s either GW or FLGS.

To have a plastic kit come sans a single part is….rare. Not impossible, sure. Could be knocked off during packaging, or miscast. But it’s not as open to human error as the old metal kits, when it was packing multiple bits by hand. Sometimes you’d get a free extra bit, or two left arms, a missing foot etc.

I think a few things happened, with varying levels of importance.

First, the US and the UK handle defects and returns very differently. In the US, we tend to deal with manufacturer's, not retailers, while IIRC the UK is the opposite. So even if I buy my box from MiniMarket, if it's defective, I would take it up with GW.

Second, as noted, the shift from mostly metal to virtually all plastic has really cut way down on defects. Obviously they can still happen, but they should be rarer.

Third, shipping has gotten more expensive (outpacing inflation) and so the cost to GW to replace a sprue (which costs essentially nothing) is higher.

Fourth, GW gained a great reputation, and it's policy was abused.

Fifth, this reputation was always a bit more regional and of a time than we think. There was a time when a large chunk of the GW purchased was directly from a GW shop in the UK, and so you just went back, and got a replacement, often keeping the broken part. Once more stuff went mail order/third party/non-UK, this mentality waxed and waned, but eventually became a real cost.