You're right, Nuts, there is no UK distributor importing a £1M+ worth of stock, but there are retailers acting as sole distributors for certain brands, but on a much smaller scale; for eg Fire Support are ICS for England & Wales and Land Warrior are ICS for Scotland - now in one way this makes no sense at all, in that surely tf national boundaries have less impact than the texture of shite on our boots on the already relatively small market for the whole of airsoft, let alone ICS products in particular, but FS have occasionally really taken the piss over prices (even of stuff that wasn't in stock lol) and I suspect that without LW as competition, Frank would get in there and dip his bread at every opportunity. I swear to you, I imported a set of ICS fast & quiet helical gears MC-108 from the USA, paying the VAT and courier fee, and it was still cheaper than Frank quoted me over the phone and a week faster too...
And then there's Zero One and the infamous "we'll have 'em soon, honest" CYMA CM.048 and CM.048M... how can it be over £40 cheaper to get one imported from Poland when you add in postage (free from Poland ffs)? These are not niche items. If you don't want an M4, or you do want an opfor gun, they are the best available as an alternative to wombat machines. But with Airsoft World and Action Hobbies muscling in, somehow none of 'em are managing to keep CYMA/Cybergun in stock reliably.
But there are distributors, like a good bloke who is into airsoft for the love of it as well as making a few quid who supplies ammo and pyros to a fair few sites, probably most in the East Mids/South Yorks, as well as some guns and spares... but he is pretty limited in what he gets and it's for the reasons already outlined: he just hasn't got the capital to keep stock on the shelves which may not sell before he needs to scrape his cash and pre-orders together for the next import. Also there isn't enough money in it for him to do nothing else to make a living. Another company, made up of people who came into it from love of the sport/hobby and have translated that now into literally the best customer service ethic I've ever come across bar none, genuinely do do their best to get anything people ask for and if you talk to them in person will attempt to beat any price you can show them is legit, but... they don't have the spending power of even the small time 'distributors' or the larger retailer-cum-distributors.
So we are currently stuck between people who would love to have piles of whatever we want and sheds full of old/rare stuff that they themselves would dip into frequently, but just don't have the money to do that, and people who may well have had a love of the sport/hobby but in trying to make a living now come over as if they would simply love to have sheds full of our money. In my estimation our only way forward is to grow the market... paintball has made several multi-millionaires - airsoft is slowly but surely taking over the 'combat shooting game' market so it has the potential to become huge, but it also has the potential to get very expensive, if a few larger companies manage to raise the kind of capital which would deliver the stock levels we would prefer but the market does not grow as rapidly as forecast...
