Delivery Charges.

[Tom.F]

Evening.

I'm wondering if anyone can clarify me, on why it cost's £70 delivery to ship one item from your warehouse in Bolton to the Channel Islands, which is only across the English Channel.

Other online shops such as Amazon, Play.com & eBuyer don't charge anything over £10 for delivery. Why is their such an inflated price when purchasing from Scan.co.uk?

It certainly doesn't cost £70's to deliver to us, it costs even less to get items sent from the USA!

Thanks for your time & help.

- Tom.

[Adywebb]

Just a little bump as I'm interested to know too.

[Chris P]

I do appreciate what you are saying and indeed this is something we are looking into at the moment. The prices which we charge reflect the cost to us by Citylink although we do realise that the prices we quote for offshore addresses (especially Channel Isles and ROI) are perhaps not always as cost effective as we'd want them to be. They are based on weight and volume, so you have this situation where you could spend £500 on a CPU and mem, and as it's very light the carriage might cost £30, whereas you could spend £30 on a tower case and the carriage might be over £60!!

In recognition of this we have recently started looking around at different couriers to see if there is an alternative option we can offer for our offshore customers. Indeed, as you say Royal Mail do offer delivery to Channel Isles, but unfortunately will only cater for parcels up to 10kg, and they are only cheaper than Citylink for parcels upto 1kg. When you get over 1kg, they are actually much more expensive than Citylink.

We have also looked at Parcel Force but they are only able to better Citylink's prices if we were to shift all the rest of our UK mainland business (a few thousand parcels a day) over to them aswell, as they would work out a better rate based on sheer volumes. The volume of just the international orders is less than 2% of our business so we would not be entitled to a much better rate with this kind of volume alone. However, their prices and service for UK mainland does not come close to Citylink, so if we were to go ahead with this then we would be increasing the cost effectiveness for 2% of our customers but lowering the level of service and increasing the carriage rates for the other 98% of our customers.

As you can see we are stuck for the moment in a difficult situation.

However, please rest assured we are doing everything we can to better accomodate for our international customers and you should see further developments in the future. We hope to find a way to better cater for our offshore customers at some point in the not too distant future and we hope that we can still look forward to your custom in the future.


Many thanks for taking the time out to contact us with your feedback.

Kind regards,

[Tom.F]

I understand that you have to cater for your majority customer base when it comes to delivery charges/services!

But the problem that I'm seeing is that, I bought £700's worth of computer parts from eBuyer (who also use city-link), which included a Case, 22" monitor, Hard Drives, PSU ect! And the delivery only cost I think, just under £20. This was from Sheffield to Channel Islands.

Now surely, it doesn't cost another £50 extra to deliver from Bolton to Channel Islands. Note that my order was initially only going to be a pack of memory modules!

Thanks for your feedback though, is appreciated!