Jump straight to “How to get the best prices possible” to save even more on your purchases than any other website…
Or read the full article to find everything you need to know on pricing…
Pricing Policy
Quite simply, our pricing policy is to do everything possible to give you the best prices!
To do this, we use a combination of technology to make pricing accurate and sustainable, and good research and development decisions to keep all costs as low as possible through economies of scale.
Price Calculation
There are a number ways of presenting prices, including or excluding postage, packaging, import duties & sales taxes, and the modest wage of the good people receiving, dispatching and delivering your goods, and those here every day to answer your questions and show you the best deals we can find and negotiate with manufacturers for you.
The price you pay is affected by the overall efficiency of the total order, and we pass on all savings possible for larger orders because they simply cost us less to dispatch, so they should cost you less by that same amount too!
Pricing International Products
Through reading and considering all your much-appreciated feedback, the vast majority of people want to see the price of the product and shipping separately.
Now you can easily compare prices and shipping with websites around the world – and especially to compare with websites in the country of origin for imported products that often don’t have such competitive international managed shipping options.
We’re now pleased to bring you this by default, so you can now see the price of the product from the manufacturer, and the export, import and delivery separately for a true, fair and transparent comparison.
This helps you see both; the economies of scale we create through volume discounts with manufacturers, and the cost-efficiency savings we create in getting those products fresh from the production line to your door as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Try us; compare us to any other website, and share with us any feedback on anything you want us to look at or compare too!
Price Transparency
Shipping
For the purposes of this article and succinct explanation, we will use the term *Shipping* to include: the cost of purchase from the manufacturer including payment processing, accounting and foreign exchange transfer fees, the cost of shipping to each fulfilment or freight-forwarding warehouse, the cost of export and import into each warehouse, the cost of safe storage, cleaning, safety and rotation, and then picking, packing, packaging, carrier delivery, carrier postal charges and finally any applicable import duties and taxes for your delivery country if the warehouse is located outside of there, and the cost of tracking and then delivery confirmation processing by your local last-mile carrier.
Yes, there’s a lot involved!
Don’t worry though, our job is to show you how to get those costs as low as possible!
Free Shipping
Of course, there’s no such things as free of cost, therefore *Free Shipping* is simply a way of presenting total prices per item and order in a way that you can see the overall cost per item more easily, including the cost of manufacture, international transport, duties, taxes, storage, pick, pack, packaging, dispatch and delivery per unit quantity – which all adds up to the global price you see and the price you pay.
With all the technology in the world though, it is still not possible to incorporate every possible ordering permutation into each item price this way, so it has to be based on majority averages and the lowest common denominator – but that will then both mean higher headline all-inclusive prices are seen first, and include an element of rounding that you won’t see and can’t offer all the same cost-saving transparency benefits of *Plus Shipping* pricing.
Plus Shipping
Our speciality is in sourcing high-quality and ethical brands from around the world and also delivering them around the world – so there’s a lot of costs to calculate and bear in mind.
Generally, the overall highest percentage cost in any supply-chain from manufacture to consumer is government taxes.
Taxes are good, because they are the commission we all pay our governments, so that they can reliably provide all the shared services like education, health and security that we all agree are best paid for collectively and delivered without the overheads of sales, marketing and payment processing.
However, the *way* you order goods and the route they take can have a large effect on the overall percentage of duties and taxes, so again, we use technology to calculate all those costs and permutations to offer you the most cost-efficient ordering options.
Of course, we still proudly pay all the correct taxes accurately, lawfully and dutifully – although, we also reduce the costs of tax collection with consolidated freight and electronic processing of taxes owed according to the route to keep the costs of tax collection as low as possible, and therefore benefit governments and yourself with lower overall costs in the movement and tracking of goods and service.
After that the cost of the actual product from the Manufacturer, and the cost of all shipping from them to you.
After that, is the cost of marketing, which nowadays is mostly the website and data-feeds into other websites.
Last of all is the cost of us, here and working for you, which is the lowest overall percentage of the price, and as our volumes rise and our fixed-costs are static, we can then pass on all cost-savings directly back to you through lower shipping costs, volume discounts and referral commissions where we can also save on marketing costs.
Fast vs Cheap vs Quality
It is a common triage presented, where they say, choose two and that will tell you what the third will be.
Although, it is still always possible to improve all three, and that is what we call *efficiency*, through economies of scale, and you see as value for money.
We *only* source products from established, certified and reputable brands, so you can be assured that we never compromise on quality in sourcing from only the highest regarded, transparent and accountable manufacturers that back their guarantee of product quality to you.
This leave fast vs cheap – and that is for you to choose – so it is for us to offer you both options.
You ask us to find the lowest possible prices, and only visit our website to consider ordering, if we can offer the best price for a reliable service – so we must always calculate and offer you the lowest price possible – and we do just that.
However, this means using standard delivery service with the matching broader delivery time range, which you should factor into your cost-savings and order planning so that the more expensive fast part doesn’t make any difference to you – even though we will still always get you your order as quickly as humanly possible with the legally enshrined trust of national postal carriers that are responsible for the safe and prompt delivery of your goodies.
Sometimes you need fast as well, so we are adding routing and service options all the time to give you those options too – although 98% of customers still choose the lower overall price when they are happy to wait for their typical standard local postal delivery service, the choice is still important as we all sometimes just need something quicker and are happy to pay speedy to save us time and money in another area.
Our Prices
After many years of studying and listening to feedback on the advantages and disadvantages of each method of calculating prices, we concluded that the best way to present prices is however you would like to see them, and give you the choice to see and compare *both* methods of calculation to find the best overall value for your order size and variety needs.
We have always believed in efficiency, accuracy, honesty and transparency in our offerings, it’s part of our Mission Statement, which means that we now present prices by default as *plus shipping* – so that you can see the actual price of the product from the Manufacturer – and the actual cost of getting it to you through whatever routing and delivery service option you prefer.
This also puts us on a level playing field with search engines and price comparison websites where sometimes less transparent competitors will hide their shipping costs until you get to the payment page, which simply wastes your time and makes it harder for you to make a true and fair comparison quickly.
We never hide prices, we always offer the lowest possible prices and costs, and we do everything we can to find and guide you towards the most cost-efficient brands and ways to order that give you the best overall value, so you can rely on our website and delivery, and save yourself precious time and money.
Price Presentation
Pricing can look confusing, quite simply because almost every business does this differently, and now many platforms present pricing in different ways too!
Search Engines
Google, for example, only shows the price of the product, and cannot calculate actual shipping so tends to optionally show the value presented by the website – which means that many websites have now split their pricing presentation so that the item pricing appears lower to be eye-catching in search results, and the service costs are added on afterwards depending on your dispatch and delivery option choices – but sometimes more difficult to find when they are hidden at the end of the checkout process.
Price Comparison
Airlines of course are famous for being forced to adopt this presentation model since the advent of price-comparison websites, whereby the headline price is what catches people’s eye or even enables their offers to show on the first page of search results.
So, we might comment on it being more complicated nowadays – but we also asked for this with our choices in researching prices indirectly and what we click on.
They have simply responded and given us what we are looking for, the lowest headline prices and optional services based on our preferences – and other industries have now followed this too.
Thankfully we still have choices, and competition is still innovating, we just made a bit more work for ourselves in researching and comparing because of this headline pricing preference for our attention – but now our valued custom and variety of needs has encouraged our service providers to offer more options and innovations for all budgets and preferences.
Fair Trade Pricing
So, this options-based pricing presentation model is driven by customers use of these search engines and often only including those offers in their browsing and consideration that appear on the first page for your search – we all do it – although, many of us are now learning we need to do more work to compare the overall resulting total price for our preferences – so we like to find a trusted brand and then tend to stick with them in exchange for the loyalty bonuses we get in return for the mutual cost-savings that trusted loyalty creates for both parties.
This also means we have a responsibility to the growers and makers in the country of origin your goods are made in, so we always pay a fair price for stock, and use all our technical development and automation capabilities to put all the cost-efficiency into the onward transit and delivery – so makers and manufacturers can continually invest in researching and developing their own infrastructure, for economies of scale and high-quality training and education which you then see as innovation and increasing value.
Our Price Presentation
In order to even get your attention in search engines and price comparison engines among aggressive competition, we must present *Plus Shipping* pricing by default.
Depending on how you look at it, the shipping cost can then appear quite high proportionally. Although, this is genuinely what it costs us to get the goods from manufacturer to you, so it can also be very revealing and help you to choose the most efficient and best value-for money options for you.
For those that still think *Free Shipping* is free of cost or consequence, or just want to see total item price including all transit and delivery costs, we still offer you a way to see prices *including* shipping too.
However, and this is a bigger issue – *for larger orders and bulk-buying* you can only achieve the lowest overall prices by looking at *Plus Shipping* pricing – which you will see as you add items or quantities in your basket.
This also highlights that those *Free Shipping* and *Subscribe & Save* offers you see in Amazon, Ebay and others aren’t always the best deal for you or the environment, and is why we always recommend transparency in *Plus Shipping* pricing and bulk-buying to save time, money and materials costs all the way along the global journey your goods can take.
How do you get the best price?
The first thing to bear in mind, is that small orders for 1 item cost everyone the most amount to process, so ideally you should aim to build a basket of 3 or more items for the economies of scale in payment processing and dispatch to give you an overall more favourable per-item cost.
Often the savings can be 10% to 50% or more for bulk-buying, so if you use something regularly, things like *Subscribe & Save* programmes are actually very expensive and inefficient overall, and you will save more by buying supplies for a longer period of time all in the same order.
Order sooner to take advantage of the reliable and economical national postal delivery rates for all areas, effectively, you are paying yourself to wait, and often there’s little or no difference in delivery times when economy post always travels as quickly as possible, it just doesn’t get a speedy boarding queue-jump if there are any delays.
Subscribe to our email newsletter, it’s free, and the most up-to-date and reliable notification for when we publish the special offers we have been able to negotiate or calculate based on trending high-demand categories.
Come directly to our website, it save us both the money for clicks through advertising websites, and we pass on all those savings too.
Tell us what you are looking for, if we don’t have it in stock but you can’t find it economically, then we can order it in especially for you, often in wholesale case quantities too, so you can really get what you are looking for at the lowest possible price.
Tell your friends about us! The greater the economies of scale we create, the lower prices you will get – and we pass on the entire marketing budget for new customers to you both as a discount voucher code. You are again saving us both money, because marketing costs are an overhead expense when your research and experience is more valuable to your friends, so we give it right back to you both.
Tell us if you have seen a lower price anywhere else and take advantage of our Price Promise! We genuinely might have missed a supplier deal – or it might be that a competitor has made a mistake and is offering a price they can’t actually deliver or are doing something neither of us think is transparent.
Tell us about discount vouchers codes you have seen elsewhere and we’ll match or beat then!
Send us feedback on our website – you are all thousands more than us in browsing and using the website every day – if you spot something that doesn’t work for you, it might not be working for others too – the faster we find and fix anything the better for everyone!
Write nice positive feedback reviews on review websites, the more people that know about your happy experience, the more people we can help, the better deals we can create and lower costs for everyone!
Basically, you are in control of the price you pay, and we are very grateful for your employing us with your custom to get you everything you want and keep finding you more of what you need at the lowest possible prices.
We’re a team, so thank you for reading and learning more about the how’s and why’s of pricing, and we look forward to working with you for the good of everyone we all appreciate ?
