If you have been following our facebook page you will know that we have been having considerable problems with the mobile sharpening van. To a point that it has been abandoned after investing thousands in it.

We are still doing collect and return for local customers but living in a rural area that is a limited market.

I would love to build the mail order side of the business as that gives us a far wider reach for customers as well as other advantages.

I want to make life as easy as humanly possible to get stuff to us while at the same time balancing costs

I need to consider you the customer and what you will find the easiest and who you like to deal with for shipping/posting stuff

if you can take time to comment on this or my online posts it would be great.

The option that is probably the easiest for you as a customer is the good old royal mail freepost. This would be a service where you simply write FREEPOST >name< onto a parcel and chuck it into a postbox or a post office.

Technically you shouldn’t send scissors via this service as they will only accept clipper blades. If others are using this to send scissors then lets play nice and not interfere with their business.

But I have some reservations about that the first being it costs £350 a year to sign up to and ontop of that I am paying for your postage to me first class. For a typical parcel that is £3.69 which I am happy to absorb. What I am not so happy to absorb is it goes first class so you chuck your parcel into a random postbox and no one knows where the parcel is until it pops into my postbox. There is no insurance on this service and I am not willing to self insure.

Do you want to trust your grooming gear to first class royal mail untracked?

Peeking under the bonnet of my website I see that roughly 90% of you are staring at this site using a mobile device. Why you choose to use a tiny 5 inch screen instead of the three 27 inch screens I have on my desk is beyond my mortal understanding. However I can’t change what my customers do. The side effect of this mobile obsession is owning a printer these days is viewed in the same light as having a steam powered car. So most of you won’t have one (If you do have a steam powered car can i have shot?).

I need to take this into account when working out the best service to choose

What I ideally want is a service where you book your sharpening and I send you a MacGuffin. You then parcel up your sharpening and pop into a convenient shop, wave the MacGuffin at them and then the parcel is shipped onwards to me. There is various couriers who will let me build this as a service and they are listed below.

but i’d like your thoughts on them so comment on the social media post that links to this

or

Comment at the bottom

What i want to know is

1. What do you think of the royal mail FREEPOST option?

2. Are any of the below couriers a no chance for you?

Royal mail

We currently use Royal mail and they have been excellent for us. The click and drop service has been first class for us as it intergrates perfectly into the online sharpening side of the website as we use squarespace (CARE10 for a 10% discount, thanks Noah in dublin office). I have sent out a few hundred blades pushes and a handful have gone AWOL. Everything I have sent via tracked 24 has arrived pretty much on time. With the added bonus of collections from our end are via our friendly posty who we only occasionally bribe with fresh eggs.

For us they are a pretty good option but I don’t know how much others trust them so they will be remaining as our main option.

What about the rest?

DPD

They are our current secondary option and their performance for sending has been less then average so far so more then likely they will be getting kicked into touch. But they have been utterly excellent on delivering to us so the performance on sending has been puzzling.

But if they prove to be the most popular we shall stick with them

DHL

They tie into squarespace which is a big thumbs up and they have been excellent on delivery to us. I am going to look into them more deeply

They have a range of drop off locations using small shops etc

UPS

I am looking into them as they appear to have good options

Evri

GOD NO!!!!!!!!!!!

They are without a doudt the worst courier we have ever had dealings with

So please do share your thoughts