Shipping to ROI and additional costs

[Chosen]

Hello there,
First time shopper from Scan and I am a bit puzzled. I live in the ROI and when I created my account, I did not see an option to select the country.
However, having received an email from the Scan staff a few months ago, that they do indeed deliver to Ireland, I went ahead and placed my order, cause I wanted to give them a go.
I selected 2 items, paid by Credit Card and received the email confirmation that my order has been received.
At this point, the shipping charges were £10.64+VAT, which is almost the same I pay over at Specialtech.co.uk and OCUK. I received another couple of emails from Scan (status updates) and then I received the following email:

Mr xxx xxx (me),

Invoice Number: Exxxxxx
Price quoted provisionally on website: £220.69 (inc vat & carriage)

Hi there,

Now that we have packed your order and weighed it, we are able to confirm the correct carriage charge on your order to be shipped by Citylink. The correct charge should be another £15.00 + vat. If you wish to go ahead with your order then we'll need to take an additional amount from your card.

Please reply to this email and let me know if we can go ahead with this and we will do so immediately.

Kind regards,

xxxx
Scan Computers

And my questions are:

a) Is this normal practice? You advertise shipping costs of £xx.xx and then send emails saying "ok, now that we weighed your package, we decided that it's going to be another £15+VAT in order to send it to you, which by the way we do not state anywhere in our website"?

b) What does "£220.69 (inc vat & carriage)" mean to you? Especially the "incl carriage" bit.

c) The telephone number field on my account page, was a mandatory one, and so I provided my mobile number. The last time I checked my email, I got a confirmation that the order has been paid and when I checked in my account page, I saw that the delivery date is tomorrow. Now that I came back home, I see the above email, which basically says "You know what, we actually want more money than what we advertised as shipping costs and by the way, we won't ship the order until you pay the additional charges, which do not show anywhere on our website".
It's 18:10 now that I saw this email, that was sent at 16:30. How difficult would it be, to pick up the phone and give me a call, to the number that you specifically requested that I give you?


So, if the order will not be shipped before tomorrow, why should I go any further and not cancel the charges in my Credit Card and do my shopping from another shop that is not hiding their shipping charges behind emails and other tricks?

[Chris P]

Thank you for the feedback

To explain our carriage charges are based on weight and the Post code for delivery. When an order is placed we ask for a Post Code to either log into your account or when creating a new account. Republic of Ireland orders would be classed as International as there would not be a valid UK post code, which our site asks for. We are certainly not hiding the carriage charges as the web site clearly asks for a UK post code when you place an order.

It would be possible to create an order as you have done so by-passing or entering "dummy" information into the Post code box; because this field has been filled in incorrectly the incorrect carriage charge would be shown incorrectly

We can accept orders to the Republic of Ireland but only over the Sales line where we can advise of the carriage charge to the Republic of Ireland.

We are due to release a mirror site for Northern / Southern Ireland, which be tailor made to accept orders to non mainland UK address as well as some other tweaks so please watch this space.

In the meantime if you can PM me your invoice number I can re-confirm the correct carriage charge for you. If you then wish to cancel the order I can action this for you

Best Regards