northern ireland Carriage Charges

[smegger040588]

hi there i have recently been trying to put together a budget system for my mum and dad as theirs has stopped working, after a few days of sorting compatibility etc i was finally happy with my order on scan just to find that delivery jumps to £30 once i enter my details this seems to be a recent trend in many store but i was just wondering if something could be done to offer a budget service to northern ireland, i am not saying a dont mind paying a little extra but as i am an ebay merchant and it only costs me $56 to ship a quite heavy package from the usa to anywhere in world pretty much i was wondering why such postage costs?

[Gordy]

Its been stated in here several times, the reason for the high cost is because thats what their courier charges for the shipping. They can't control that.

Do a quick search in here for it

[smegger040588]

i know for sure royal mail dont charge extra, could something like this not be set up? and i cant see about high courier costs i have couriered 4 18inch 20kgs a piece ally wheels from mid england to my door for £50, i just dont see how it cost that amount having experience with couriers myself!

[GoNz0]

i think you can arrange your own collection if you needed to ?
maybe another courier would collect from scan and deliver.

[Gordy]

i know for sure royal mail dont charge extra, could something like this not be set up? and i cant see about high courier costs i have couriered 4 18inch 20kgs a piece ally wheels from mid england to my door for £50, i just dont see how it cost that amount having experience with couriers myself!

Scan don't use royal mail though. They use city link, have a look on their site for pricing.

See these links for more info

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...rthern+ireland
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...rthern+ireland
http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...rthern+ireland

[Funkstar]

as has been stated in many threads in the past, Scan will not use Royal Mail.

GoNzO is right though, you can arrange a collection from Scan, this has also been sugested in the past for other customers. Not ideal i know, but right now there is nothing more Scan can do.

I'm only guessing at this bit, but Scan might have a contract with CityLink that specifies next day deliveries. This makes the NI delivery a lot more expensive as it is the Next Day service. There is probably no easy way for them to offer a 2-3 day option for NI under their current contract or ordering/logistics system.

[smegger040588]

i know its been said before and that its prop a contract thing but i just think its such a huge price, £30 disregarding weight i know living here costs more to post it, i just was putting its forward that a less speedy service could be offered at a lower price i am sure it would be in scans interests to talk to city link about such a service as they i am sure loosing lots of business from here as other than that they seem to have a pretty good rep. i dont know about anyone else but getting stung £30 without any other options just for being born in this country is pretty arse lol.

[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.

[smegger040588]

no worries thanks for the reply its every etailer seems to be the same, and when you are on a budget it is quite enfuriating when you have everything you want at the price you want only to get a large shipping cost slapped on.

if i was to organise carrage for pick up cheaper would it be accetable?

[Chris P]

Hopefully we can find a suitable resolution shortly