As a part time ‘hobby’ business, we can’t dedicate ourselves 24×7 to this niche shop – but we do our very best. Ultimately we try to dispatch things as quickly as we can, but also fitting it around our already busy lives.
As a small business, our shipping has to be realistic, and as we charge our individual items at a fair rate, our profit margins are relatively low. Therefore we do not offer a free delivery threshold. It just doesn’t work out very fair that way – especially for international customers. We do offer a one off postage charge though – i.e. however much you order, you’ll pay only the highest individual shipping amount.
As of April 2023, we’ve simplified our range of shipping options. Everything now ships as ‘tracked’ for two reasons:
- Royal Mail domestic ‘Tracked’ service now cover items up to £150. Therefore rather than trying to decide between Unsigned (£20 cover), Signed For (£50 cover) or Special Delivery (£750 cover), we dispatch everything as Tracked 48. This may cause something like a £1 increase at the low-value end of orders, but when ordering anything over £20, the savings are significant, and this is passed on to you, the customer.
- For all international orders, untracked shipping has proven problematic on occasion. Therefore all such orders are now sent as International Tracked, with suitable cover (£50 or £250) in place.
Everything is available to UK domestic, Europe and worldwide – with only the usual sanctioned countries excluded.
How do We Calculate Our Shipping?
It’s a pretty simple and, we think, fair formula. Quite simply, we take Royal Mail base charge for the required service. We add on 50p for packaging, and then the Paypal fees for that shipping charge – relative to the part of the world you are ordering from. Then we just round to the nearest 5p, subject to a minimum of £2.70 for large letter items.
For something like a UK Small Parcels Tracked 48 service, the Royal Mail base charge is £3.29. We add on 50p for the packaging, then 2.9% Paypal fees – giving a rounded cost of £3.9.
The same formula is used all the way up to a World Zone 2 <750g Tracked and Insured to £250, where the Royal Mail base charge is £21.15. Adding on the 50p packaging, then 4.9% Paypal fees (it’s more expensive to accept cross-border transactions), that comes to £22.70.
We think that’s really fair, and we hope that given our explanation, you will too.