You spoke and we listened.

We have decided to reduce our delivery charge from £3.99 to £2.99.

Free delivery will continue to be for shipments over £35.

The fact is that delivery charges are super expensive for small companies like ours and, though it costs us more than £2.99 for packaging, delivery and handling, we understand that it's a bugbear of our customers.

The issue is that many customers see free delivery almost as a right due to the fact that they can get free delivery from Amazon as a prime customer.

If you're reading thus far, it may be useful to know how Amazon can afford to give free delivery to all and sundry?

Amazon often actually fails to make a profit on its online retail business and their own delivery system cost Amazon $21 billion in 2017 to deliver all those parcels.

(Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/free-shipping-isnt-hurting-amazon/559052/) 

So how do they do it?

Well, they have a highly profitable division of the Amazon family called Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which handles the domains of everyone from John Lewis to the Home Office to the CIA and millions of other websites.

This is highly profitable and almost a license to print money, so Amazon can help support the loss making online retail business where we all buy our stuff, so that it can allow free shipping.

This is one reason why the European Union and the USA are both looking into whether Amazon has become "anti-trust" or a monopoly by essentially subsidising one division from profits from another completely unrelated division.

 

December 31, 2020 — Guy Wilmot

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