I would appreciate hearing your reasons, Alex.
First of all I want to say that I think we are very fortunate to be in an industry where we have, for the main part, been able to continue working and earning a living despite the Covid Pandemic restrictions. I am grateful that I was not in the hospitality or travel sector at this time.
My explanation below is in no way trying to complain or moan about the cost or challenges of doing business – I am very fortunate to have a robust business that has been steadily growing despite the world situation around us. Whilst we are still a small family business we do employ nearly 40 staff and having a healthy business does mean that this responsibility is not more burdensome than it needs to be.
Removal of Free Postage on orders over £60 – yes this is a price rise – pure and simple.
We have not always provided free postage, but introduced it as a sales promotion many years ago in order to ‘encourage’ customers to buy more goods from us to increase order size and spend more money with us – and this has always worked very well to gently push up the size of orders from our customers. Despite this, nearly 40% of our customer orders have paid for postage as they were under the free limit – such orders have not been affected.
Why remove this now? There are several reasons that have coalesced into this change.
1. The price of doing business in the Covid and Post Brexit economy. The rise in prices have been relentless the last 15 months or so. All of our raw materials have increased in price dramatically – sometimes up to 3 price rises in one calendar year. The cost of moving/storing goods has been ridiculous. The cost of shipping a 20ft container has grown from about £1500 (just freight cost, not import and port handling) to about £5000 per container. Even the humble cardboard box has risen in price dramatically and we have faced serious national shortages of packaging materials leading to price spikes. Due to the continued growth within our industry sector, we have had to manage such growth during very challenging times – this has all been costly as every Covid precaution or post-Brexit ‘work around’ has cost us time and money and at a time when many of our staff could still not come into work.
2. We have started to move into a time period where generally consumers are interested in cutting down waste and only purchasing what they need. With this in mind, some time ago we started charging a small amount for hose packs and connectors on our poles so that these would only be bought when wanted – this was also a price rise which helped our bottom line, but it did have the effect of reducing the purchasing of a component that may not have actually been needed. It also helped reduce the work load fractionally at a time when we were busier than ideal. There is an ethical issue with using promotions that encourage consumers to purchase more goods than they need and the removal of this ‘free shipping’ promotion means there is no pressure to buy just an ‘extra widget’ to hit an order value.
3. We have a very dynamic and growing customer base that has considerably increased in order volume in the last twelve months– as a business this is always encouraging. However, the rate of customer order increase has been so dramatic that we had to look at ways of slowing such growth down. We have thought about closing our books to new customers temporarily but this would bring it’s own logistical problems. For the wholesale side in March 2020 we put a freeze in place around the world where we would not appoint any new Distributors either in the UK or Internationally – this freeze will remain in place for the rest of 2021 and probably into 2022. On the retail side we looked at many ways of trying to discourage new customers and reduce the order volume from existing customers – just as in a window cleaning business there is a limit to how many windows can be cleaned with finite resources and in 2020 we reached and exceeded such limits. We aim to ‘work to live, not live to work’. One way of reducing customer orders is to reduce the range of goods supplied and we have been working on this for about 3 years now. However more was needed as we continued to grow so we chose to make the very noticeable method of rising prices by doing away with free shipping. We could have gently increased product prices that would easily have covered this and would probably have not even been noticed, but instead we wanted this very small price rise to be fully noticed, thought about and to have a larger psychological effect than its actual cost is.
Put bluntly we wanted to ‘lose’ some of our customers and their orders and for those who object to this small price rise strongly enough this will hopefully have such an effect and they will shop elsewhere – fortunately, there is plenty of choice in the market today and many other pole suppliers who can be bought from.
Can I take this opportunity to thank all our customers who have been very understanding during this difficult time – we appreciate their support very much and we will continue to do the best we can to keep supplying our customers with the best product possible in the coming months ahead.
I hope that this has helped clarify why such a decision was made 😊
