THIS IS AN OLD WEBPAGE
  Click here for our new website http://www.houseofcheese.co.uk

DELIVERY UPDATE

As from February 2003 we would like to advise customers that all goods ordered will be sent via Royal Mail Special Delivery (next day) for the time being.

Customers who have ordered from us over the past two years will have realised that we have used a combination of postal services and overnight couriers to despatch our goods. In part, this has been due to the pricing structure operated by the Post Office, in which parcels under 2kg can be sent at quite competitive rates, but the charge for a parcel over 2kg is a staggering £18! We have therefore tried to use couriers to spare customers and ourselves these excessive charges but with mixed results. The problem here is that the level of service varies greatly between courier depots and, while some deliver their parcels on time, others appear to place prompt delivery at the bottom of their list of priorities. This is frustrating both for us and our customers and often results in us having to compensate customers (at our own discretion) for goods which have been delivered late or not at all. It is significant that the Sunday Times ran an article last year which compared various courier companies involved in despatch for on-line companies, with the conclusion that none of them operated a particularly satisfactory service.

This means that, while we can continue to charge customers £6 for delivery of parcels weighing less than 2kg (including packaging), we are forced to raise our charges for goods weighing more than 2kg to £10. It will be immediately apparent that this is, of course, nowhere near the ACTUAL amount which we are charged but, until courier companies wake up to the fact that we are now in the twenty-first century and that it can take less than nine days to deliver a parcel a distance of a hundred miles, this is as good as it gets.

Royal Mail’s success rate at next day delivery is 98.7%!