Change to Postage Costs

Since I started Little Red Designs 7 years ago I have been really focused on being able to offer Free postage and packaging to deliveries to UK addresses. Since Royal Mail put up the cost of postage earlier this year - I have been monitoring its impact on my business.

As things have gone, I am sad to say that the days of offering free delivery on every order are now at an end - and I feel really sad about it.

It has taken me a long time to make this decision - initially I compensated by switching from First Class Recorded Delivery to Second Class Recorded Delivery. However, it was important to me that you products should arrive quickly once they are posted, especially when they may have taken 14 days to be made to your specification.

I had considered just simply increasing my product price to compensate for the increase postage charge, but this increases the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of a product. This means that if you buy it from one of my stockists, you are paying of a postage charge you don't need.

So, after speaking to customers and doing a bit of soul searching, I have decided that the fairest way is to offer free delivery to UK address on all orders over £30.00.

From today, if you order is under £30.00, you will be charged a small minimal flat rate free of £2.50. This charge is per order, and not per product.

I have endeavoured to keep the charge as low as possible, so not to make a profit from it, but just to cover the cost. I post all of my products via Royal Mail Recorded Delivery and the postage cost alone is between £1.85 and £3.65. So the flat fee will help pay for the Jiffy bag and the postage.  This small postage cost also means I can go back to sending my items by First Class Recorded Delivery - getting them to you within 1-3 days. Hurrah!

I then felt committed to improving the service further and have added an Express Delivery option now too. So, for every order, you will see an Express Delivery option allowing you to pay £5.00 for Royal Mail Next Day Delivery (before 1pm). This means that once the product is ready for dispatch (see lead-time for each product) it will be with you the next day. I realise that this is important to people who need items urgently and I have had a lot of requests for this option on the run up to Christmas.

I understand that this quite a long post about this subject, so thanks for reading. But I wanted to be clear and transparent about the issue and why I have changed.

Merry Christmas to everyone and I hope you have an amazing 2013!

April
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