Despite the dedication and hard work of Guy Holroyd at Linden Hill Imports, there are still many small ?garage?-type manufacturers in Russia whose products are difficult to obtain outside that country. The biggest obstacle is making payment for those products in a business environment where it seems that the major credit card companies and PayPal don?t want to be involved. With the help (and patience!) of Anatoliy Kovalev (GoNzA) and some suggestions from Musa Zekoreev (Walker) and Aleksandr Kozyrev (Kajuk), finally, after many false starts, I found a relatively easy way of sending money to sellers in Russia. The company is called Contact; their web site is here:
http://www.contact-sys.com/eng/transfer/onlinetransfer.htmlThe method:
(1) [Edit - thanks, Musa!] All the seller needs is a bank account to receive a transfer of funds.
(2) The seller provides the buyer with details of the bank account he has set up for payment purposes. This includes the seller?s name, name of the bank and branch address (including a four-character alphabetic code which apparently identifies the branch), and the branch telephone number.
(3) The buyer can then arrange secure transfer of funds to the seller?s bank account by forwarding this information to a Contact agent and making payment of the necessary amount plus a $7 transaction fee to the agent.
(4) The Contact agent makes the payment into the seller?s account, then e-mails to the buyer a completed order form as a record of the transfer. This includes a 5-digit numeric transaction code (very important) which the buyer must e-mail to the seller in order for the bank to confirm the transaction to the seller.
Some suggestions:
(1) It helps if the Contact agent has people who can speak and read Russian. I had excellent service from a lady named Ira (pronounced ?EE-ra?) at the head office of Meest Corporation in Toronto, although it seemed that there were several other people at that office who were fluent in Russian.
(2) It also helps if the Contact agent is able to accept credit card information by telephone or e-mail. This eliminates the need to go to the office to make payment in person.
(3) The Russian postal service as a member of the International Postal Union can assign a tracking number to individual mail shipments which can be used on-line to determine the progress of a shipment. There may be a small fee payable by the sender for this feature, but it?s worth having.
I hope this information is helpful and assists in making some of these excellent products more easily available to modelbuilders outside Russia. The process I?ve described above may sound a bit complicated, but it?s a walk in the park compared to some of the alternatives ? actually it?s quite easy since the Contact agent takes care of the details and guides you through the process. If there are any questions or corrections regarding what I?ve tried to describe, please let me know.
John
