Postal Price Changes
by
Anbar
on Mon 12 May 2008 16:02 BST
Some major updates that customers should be aware of:
First off we have sadly had to change all UK postal services to Recorded Signed For. This means an additional 72pence for all UK mainland deliveries including both 1st Class and 2nd Class packages.
The reasons for this are specifically down to the increasing number of Paypal Scams that we have been encountering within the UK (Customers claiming a non-delivery and having Paypal reverse the payment.)
The rate of 'missing parcels' for Paypal customers was seven times higher than that for non-Paypal customers, clearly given that everything goes via the same service (Royal Mail) the chances of this being anything other than a deliberate scam by Paypal customers was extremely remote indeed.
Whilst we understand that such scams are only perpetrated by a minority of Paypal users it has still meant losses to us of hundreds of pounds a year which has meant that we can no longer afford to keep using Paypal as a payment system without making some changes.
Therefore as we are not covered by Paypal's Seller protection Policy unless we use a recorded service, then we have been forced to adopt the Recorded Signed For service for all of our UK mail and International Signed-For and Airsure only for International Mail.
Secondly we are bringing our postage prices in line with the current Royal Mail prices, this will mean a small increase in the postage prices within the UK (and later Global prices). For the last few months we have been running the postage at a loss but have to now bring them up too date.
Similarly all International mail now has to be sent by a Signed-For service; either International Signed-For or Airsure and standard Airmail and Surface Mail have had to be withdrawn as viable services. In the meantime the actual cost of International Signed-For has gone down slightly.
We were loathe to make these changes, as any increase in postal prices obviously impacts our sales, however over 90% of our customers use Paypal to buy their items and removing paypal as a payment option was clearly not something that we could do.
We do understand that this means that a minority of unscrupulous Paypal customers have made this necessary and that the overwhelming majority of customers are entirely legitimate. it is worth pointing out that the UK Royal Mail service is extremely efficient and reliable: in an average month we send out around 50 packages within the UK to people who have paid by Credit Card or other non-paypal methods and of those the average loss, or non-delivery, is just one package a month (at the most).
In the same time though we can see 6 or 7 Paypals claims of non-delivery from the remaining 450 packages: seven times the failure rate. When these orders are often in the £50 -£100 region it becomes obvious that we simply cannot afford to let the situation continue.
We are looking at alternative means of delivery within the UK and Europe and hope to be able to find cheaper traceable or signed-for services sometime in the near future.
In the mean time please remember that if you receive a parcel that you think you have been charged too much for then please do not hesitate to get in touch with us - the postal pricing system is fully automated and cannot be checked on every package to ensure that it is doing its job correctly - if you have been over charged then let us know ASAP and we look into it with the aim of refunding any excess postal charges that are not correct.
