By the Numbers: GMT P500-order shipping costs to Australia

 

Notes: This is just my own rationale regarding the cost of shipping. This is a subject I’ve touched on before, and I’m sure it will come up again at irregular intervals. It’s timely, because I’m just about to get charged for a P500 order, and there were last-minute changes to the weight estimates that threw out my initial calculations.

In this post, I will be looking exclusively at the Australian situation. I don’t seem to get a lot of readers from New Zealand, but if there’s any interest, I’ll do a follow-up on the New Zealand situation. New Zealand deliveries come through the Australian distributor, VR Distribution, so they cost a little more.

Unless otherwise stated, ALL the currency values represented here are in US dollars (US$ or USD). The Australian dollar has been jumping around too much to make a reliable estimate of translated prices on anything. If you don’t live in Australia, this probably won’t be all that interesting for you, and I won’t be offended if you skip it.

Nine pounds of promise.

Point of origin shipping to Australia/New Zealand Canada, Europe, Japan, and Asia/Pacific Rim was announced in the September 2025 GMT Update* (the Overseas Shipping Matrix can be found here, but you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page). This significantly reduced the shipping costs of P500 games, compared to shipping with UPS from the States. The downside is delivery is by surface – container ship – rather than air, so we’re talking delivery on months, not weeks.

I’ve heard – well, read – people complaining on the internet that shipping is still very high. I get this. While the A$ has strengthened against the US$, but it’s still roughly three-to-two once you work in exchange costs and so on. I get it, but I have to disagree. Still order P500 game because they are generally a little cheaper than ordering from local or overseas sellers (not every time, but often enough to wash out toa net gain) and because, even with the longer shipping times, they still tend to arrive earlier – months earlier – than in Australian stores. There’s one more reason; Some of the games I order are pretty niche (even within the niche of wargaming). There is simply no guarantee that a given title will be picked up by local sellers.

This post was borne out of prepping an order for myself and two friends, charging in a couple of days (late March). I had to juggle my own order and drop two titles because of cash-flow issues (a Sophie’s Choice moment for me), but sometimes you just have to make some hard decisions. As happens sometimes, the weights of nearly all of the games in the order had gone up by one-to-four pounds each, so something had to go.

This got me thinking about the actual shipping rates. When I’m ordering for other people as well, I’ll work out the overall weight, divide the shipping cost by the weight of the overall order, then times that number by the number of pounds that person’s share of the order comes to. This is the most equitable way to work it out. The other way to do it would be to count off your buddy’s pounds first on the chart, because they’re the most expensive ones, and ride on the back of that. But that would be a dick move, and I put some effort into not being a dick.

But this got me thinking about how much bang you get for your shipping buck. I had a feeling that the sweet spot for value for money would be around 16-20 lbs, but I didn’t have the numbers to back that up.

Below is an extract from GMT’s Shipping Matrix, looking at just the Australia-Friendly P500 shipping costs listing the weight-parameters and costs; most cost divisions scale between two and ten pounds. That’s to the left. To the right are the costs per pound (in USD). To the right are the costs per pound at the lowest and highest number of pounds within the bracket.

The numbers don’t lie. To be honest, I’m a little surprised my feels more or less proved right, though, depending on how you measure it, you could argue the “sweet spot” is roughly between 14 and 30 lbs total weight.

This of course doesn’t take into account how much you’re paying for your games, which is, the P500 case, is probably going to be the greater share of the cost. I’m not advocating putting oneself into hock to save a few bucks on shipping, but I hope this will help my fellow Australians put the cost into context.

I have a list of thirty or more things ordered on P500 at any given time, a literal list in a Word doc with the current estimated weights and pre-order prices, and I try to monitor any changes as they come up. Personally, I always cancel an order when it’s just one item. But I nearly missed the weight revisions to the games in the latest order. The Grand Battles expansion for Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2026) was revised up from five pounds to nine; that alone jacked up the shipping by around $40.00 (two copies ordered), and all the other games in the order had gone up in weight estimate from one to three pounds. I’m not railing on GMT over this – caveat emptor – but I would like to see these increases signalled somehow beyond simply changing the number on the product page. If I nearly got caught, there must be others, and some of them may be operating on an even slimmer margin than me.

In the end, the order has come out to five boxes, of which three are for me, and one each for two fellow gamers. To be fair, all the items ordered are pretty hefty; the lightest is Baltic Empires (GMT Games, 2026) at six pounds, the C&C Naps expansion being the heaviest, so the total nominal weight of the parcel will be 38lbs, which comes to US$168.00 in shipping.

Let’s look at a single case. One of the Grand Battles sets is for me. At nine pounds, the shipping cost for that comes to $39.78, roughly two thirds of the (P500) price of the box (closer to half of the MSRP). Combined, the game comes to $98.78. In my provincial currency, this translates to roughly A$145.00, and I’m okay with that. $4.42 (about A$6.25) a pound isn’t too bad in the grand scheme. To put it in context, I’m looking to send a paperback overseas. The book is about 300g (a little more than half a pound). It turns out, that book is going to cost around A$25.00 or so – about double the cost of the book – so A$6.25 per pound for overseas shipping feels like a bargain.

Every wargamer, especially us Antipodean wargamers, have to make up their how mind about how much a game is worth, or more accurately, how much we're willing to put up for a game. I’m okay with spending a fair chunk of change on two games** and an expansion that promise a lot of replayability, but we don’t have kids or a mortgage hanging over our heads, and I really don’t have much else going on. As they say, mileage may vary.

 

* Actually, I think the new programme was announced in an earlier update, but the Shipping Charge Matrix went up on the GMT website around the time of the September update.

** Full disclosure: along with the Naps Grand Battles expansion – my brother-in-law T is getting the second copy – I’ve ordered The Three Days of Gettysburg (GMT Games, 2026) and Thunderbolt Deluxe (GMT Games, 2026). I dropped a copy of Baltic Empires because I couldn't justify the outlay, and my buddy B is getting the ordered copy, so I will still get to play it sometime. I'd already 
dropped Army of the Potomac (GMT Games, 2026) because of all the games being released this round, that’s the one I’m most likely to be able to purchase locally.