The ‘drop ship’ service is now a surcharge, separated out from the delivery charge. It used to be one line including the shipping charge at a ‘flat rate’. The new lower surcharge does not include the shipping service.
The website automatically adds the surcharge to your web orders when you select a delivery address that is not your primary address.
Terms & Conditions
- A drop ship order is one that we send direct to your end-customer.
- The Drop Ship service is for occasional and emergency use - only where time is critical and your customer is genuinely unable to wait for you to receive the goods and dispatch to them in the normal way.
- We do not provide this service to support the practice of habitual drop-shipping and avoidance of holding stock. This service is to support stockists with a genuine emergency. We believe your customer satisfaction and sales volumes will benefit from holding stock of fast-moving items; whereas we understand and accept you may not wish to hold in stock every item, especially slowest-moving SKUs.
- Please use the service sparingly. We may have to withdraw the service if it is over-used.
- The surcharge is a modest and reasonable sum necessary to cover:
- the extra admin and handling we incur for retail-sized orders (but at trade margins) compared to dispatching the goods consolidated with your normal consignments;
- the admin of receiving and printing your delivery notes;
- the risk of admin incurred for tracking lost and delayed parcels for an end-customer with whom we do not have a working relationship or contact with, and to whom you should be dispatching the goods under normal circumstances.
- However, we may have to increase the surcharge to become more prohibitive if:
- the drop ship service is over-used and puts a strain on order processing or causes unacceptable delays to other customers’ orders;
- it becomes apparent that providing the drop-ship service is costing more in total than the surcharges that contribute to it.
- It becomes apparent that customers use the drop-ship service instead of reasonable stocking, use it too regularly or for non-emergency situations.
