Posted on 30th Jan 2024 @ 12:40:50 PM

The last few years we've found ourselves shifting in focus from refill inks and kits with a greater emphasis on waste ink solutions and at the same time the fallout from Brexit has subsided (somewhat) with more European and International orders than we expected. This has had a substantial and largely positive impact on how we ship our orders and, of course, we've been keeping track of what's available, what works and, as you can probably guess, we're making some changes.

UK Shipping

We are switching away from the standard Royal Mail RM48 and Special Delivery services and moving to RM24 Tracked. This service is now available and should allow us to bring overall costs down from the current levels, particularly for our Printer Pad products. It will also be much more beneficial for our customers who are in more remote areas (ie: Highlands & Islands) where the costs of shipping by courier are considerably higher.

We will continue to offer DHL Parcel and Fedex for orders that have higher values because of their overall reliability so those options will remain.

International Shipping

Spring GDS has proven itself far more effective than Royal Mail and we have no plans to change to a different provider. We are however hoping to benefit more from new services, particularly with a faster DDP service for the USA which should speed things up considerably once it finally goes live.

"Free Shipping" products (particularly Printer Pad kits) will now be offered as "Discounted shipping" due to the wide disparity between shipping costs to different countries. It was simply impossible to cover the costs of shipping to some destinations. We are also switching away from using economy/untracked post as we've noted that most customers now have the default expectation that all orders are shipped with tracking.

DHL Express and Fedex services will continue to be available as shipping options.

Packaging Changes

As a company that puts a great deal of effort into reducing electronic waste with our Printer Potty products, we are naturally looking at ways to reduce the amount of plastics and other non-recyclable packaging that we use. To that end we're switching more of our packaging to paper/card based products and biodegradable loose-fill, tapes, etc. The financial price of such products are usually much higher but we've taken a postion that the overall cost to the environment and our collective future is magnitudes greater. 

Other Changes

It goes without saying that all shipping services are putting their prices up with Fedex, DHL Express and DHL Parcel all adding around 6 - 10% on our previous years rates. That said, Spring has opted to keep the bulk of its services at the same prices (which was a pleasant surprise). All increases are being incorporated into the shipping costs shown at checkout so you may notice differences there.