Price of Delivery for N.Ireland gone up?

[neonplanet40]

Was just about to order a 15m network lead and this is the prices of delivery i got quoted


Step 1. Select your delivery date
Your Requested Delivery Date is currently set to: Monday, 17 March 2008


Step 2. Please choose your delivery times from the options below:
City Pack: All Day Delivery by 17:30 (HEXUS Discount) - £0.00 Total Price: £3.51
City Pack: Morning Delivery by 12:00 - £20.68 Total Price: £27.81
City Pack: Afternoon Delivery 12:00 - 17:30 - £20.82 Total Price: £27.98
City Pack: Morning Delivery by 10:30 - £24.92 Total Price: £32.79
City Pack: Morning Delivery by 09.30 - £29.66 Total Price: £38.36

.

Now that to me is a bit of a joke and hardly competitive. I paid Kobalt computers £11 to deliver a £2000 laptop with citylink. So can you tell me why we are getting ripped of by scan because thats what the above is. I really think you need to look into an alternative company for N.Ireland as them prices are rediculous.

EDIT: Should also say that while it says HEXUS Free Delivery - we dont get it over here so that is N/A. Also last time i picked a morning delivery it delayed my order because us over here in N.Ireland cant get that either. SO i think 1) You need to have more competitive pricing and 2) need to fix your website so it stops showing us the options we can't use.

[Chris P]

neonplanet40

Thank you for the feedback but this has been discussed many times before..

At the moment with City Link we are unable to redue the carriage charges any further ( at the moment ). To say we are ripping you off is a bit extreme , we not making huge margin on carriage this is simply what we are being charged at the moment by City Link.

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, other couriers do ship offshire such as Royal mail, 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,

[neonplanet40]

Is there no way that scan could offer the royal mail option for parcels up to 1kg? I got the network lead from OCUK and delivery cost £3.59. Thats alot cheaper than £20 something.

I was being extreme when i said your ripping us of i agree. But it becomes hard to justify buying with you guys unless i am buying a big order. I would prefer to be able to buy everything but i feel that a royal mail option would be good as alot of other companies offer it for smaller orders.

[Chris P]

The issues with Royal mail are deliveries are not properly tracked; this causes issues when trying to track an order and find out exactly where it is. Because of this issues are created with lost/delayed deliveries and as getting a confirmed POD is time consuming and not always easy to receive meaning these issues cannot be effectively resolved.

Citylink have an exceptionally and consistently high success rate for our deliveries and problems are very rare. In recognition of this, we have great deal of faith in their ability to ensure our customers orders arrive on time and in excellent condition. Over the past few years our despatch systems have become more and more integrated with theirs, which now means that the whole process from the point of ordering to the point of delivery is streamlined and informative.

The carriage charge may cost more; however you are assured of a fast hastle free delivery. Isolated problems here and there are an unavoidable consequence for any company dealing with such high volumes of deliveries as we do. By having such accurate and detailed information available to base any investigations on, we are able to quickly and effectively resolve any queries.

[kinetic]

The answer is obvious, open a branch in Northern Ireland.

[Lucio]

To give you an idea of how bad carrier charges are for overseas deliveries, I work for a mail order company. We only ship 150ish parcels a day, and they're all heavy metalic items.

Delivery costs are about £4.50 a box to UK mainland, but for NI we get hit for a stupid £17.50.

Simple fact is carrier companies can afford low prices for UK, they get 100 times as many parcels as get shipped to NI.