Free Delivery

by Stuart Lennon

Here at Nero's Notes, we offer free UK shipping on orders above £13.50. For international orders, we charge, according to weight. (We will ship anywhere, subject to being able to get a price for it, so if your country isn't listed, just drop us a note.)

Operating a web shop, you have to consider, and devise, a shipping policy.

Research will tells us that people don’t like paying for postage and packing. Apparently, we like to see a single price and pay it.

Of course, that’s no problem. All we need to do is find a courier to deliver our goods worldwide at no cost.

Who Knew?

Every single courier wants paying. Outrageous! Even Royal Mail demands pecuniary recompense. The very cheek of it!

So: the courier wants paying. The customer doesn’t want to pay.

The only way out of the conundrum is to build the cost of postage into the advertised price of the goods.

Of course, that’s a bit tricky. How many things will a customer order?

The trick is to toil over a big spreadsheet for a weekend. Pivot tables, complicated formulae and currency variations will surely produce the right answer. In truth, like all spreadsheets, it will produce any answer that you want it to: so, you end up with the number that you first thought of.

Predominantly, we use Royal Mail for all of our shipping. Usually, First Class. We follow their rules on size and weight. We also have some internal rules that we have learned 'the hard way' as it were.

Whichever way we jump, some people are upset:

“Dear Stuart, I ‘d like to buy the ‘Dinky books’ for £8, but I can’t bring myself to pay £2 P&P. Can you do free shipping?”

“Dear Customer, I’ve tried to get Royal Mail to deliver my stuff free, but they just won’t have it. They make me pay every time. Could you buy two packs of ‘dinky books’? This would qualify you for free shipping, making it much better value for money for you. If I don’t charge shipping on one pack, then I won’t make anything. Sorry. All the best, Stu.”

“Dear Stuart, so that’s a no then. Well, I won’t be able to buy from you.”

Ouch. I hate it when that happens.

We don't charge on smaller orders because we want to make a fortune, we charge because we don't want to lose money. 

So - if you're in the UK and making an order, buy two packs, or pick up a pencil or two, get yourself over that threshold - and we'll pay the postage. 😁

Free delivery. That's a misnomer. It’s not free. Ever.