As you've no doubt seen over the past few weeks and months, there's been a lot of talk about the implementation of the ban on personally importing RIFs, and how this will drastically limit the choice available to the average Irish skirmisher and collector.

We all agree that no Irish retailer can hope to stock the huge range of airsoft guns available from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and that being unable to import your RIFs yourself is, to put it mildly, a bit of a pain.

So....over the past few weeks, I've been in touch with a few of the major retailers in Asia and the UK, and I've come to an agreement with some of them. Realising that they would lose the custom of Irish consumers in the near future, some of them have agreed to partner with me to allow Irish consumers avail of the full range of RIFs available to the rest of the world.

We'll be regularly adding new lines released by our partners in Hong Kong and the UK to the Eirsoft website, and making them available for purchase. Any product marked as a Partner Product will NOT be held in stock with us (in the short term at least - more on that in a bit). When you place the order, we'll immediately order it from the supplier, who have promised to give us priority handling and shipping on every order. We would envisage receiving the product within 5-8 days, and we'll immediately ship it to you. You should normally receive it the day after we do. In the event of a delay beyond 14 days, or if we are informed its out of stock, we'll issue you with an immediate refund.

Also....this does NOT mean we are now exclusive partners with Rsov, Ehobby Asia, Fire-Support or any of the other suppliers we've partnered with - anyone can still order anything they like from them, at anytime. Except when the import ban is implemented, you will not be able to import RIFs unless you are a licensed retailer.

Personally, I've been listening to a lot of the talk about the upcoming ban, and I decided to see if we could do something about the impending lack of variety. I've spent a lot of time researching this agreement with the overseas retailers, but the only way to see if it will work is to do it - so as of now, its live.

There may be kinks to work out of the process, but I think we have 99% of the issues covered. Obviously, it would be too time consuming to list every single product from each retailer on the Eirsoft site, but I'll be regularly changing the variety on offer. If you see something on ANY Asian site you want us to import for you, just let us know and we'll quote you a price. There will be an issue tracking system implmented in the next few days which can be used for this.

The margin Eirsoft make on each product is minimal - I've kept it as tight as I possibly can so as not to take advantage of the import ban, but also make it worth my while to manage the system. So yes, buying the Partner Products from Eirsoft will cost you a little more.....but it wont break the bank.

So....in summary.....the Partner Products have started to appear on the site, and are available immediately. I'll be adding more tonight, tomorrow and for the next few days, and tweaking the offers.

If you're looking for something for Christmas, I'd imagine the cutoff date would be December 11 if you want to receive it in time for Christmas Day.

Any questions - post them below, and I'll do my best to answer them.