Sorry, but "Collection In Person" is no longer possible.
As any business develops and evolves, difficult decisions often have to be made.
Between cake-stuff.com, tartan-ribbon.com and our eBay Shop we now genuinely ship several hundred orders (thousands of items) every week to virtually every continent on the planet.
The wonders of the worldwide web mean that we no longer rely on supplying only local cake decorators - the way we would with a physical retail shop. Our marketplace is the world and we're competing very effectively on price, so that customers have told us that (for example) we charge half what they pay in Australia for FMM cutters, and a third what they pay in Norway. News spreads quickly and our sales have seen exponential growth.
As cake-stuff.com gets busier and busier, the pressure to shipping orders within the agreed timescales increases and, as we've discovered, there is a physical limit to how many orders a person can pack within a working day, even going like the clappers(!) . . . once we hit that limit it is very, very difficult to do any more within the same period of time. As a business, we need to continually look for more efficient ways to operate and one of our top priorities is to reduce the time taken to ship orders.
In today's economic climate our very survival depends on being to ship large quantities of products at very low prices. Anything which slows down our shipping speed or reduces our volume actually threatens our business. That may sound a little over-dramatic but we operate at very low profit margins so cannot absorb the additional costs brought about by anything at all which slows down the way the business ticks over, and because we're already working at the limit of what can be physically achieved, there are no extra hours in the day to make up any time lost.
As more and more people become interested in cake decorating, we attract many customers who are within driving distance. Despite explaining that we're not a retail shop, many arrive expecting to see everything we sell on display. Others want to come at weekends, others arrive without having placed an order so need "served", others want to chat for ages about the best shade of cake glitter to use . . . you get the picture. And, perhaps most crucially of all from our point-of-view, others want to collect within a day (or even same day!) of ordering. Fine if we were a shop charging much higher retail prices - but not possible the way our business now operates.
Our stock-control system has taken a battering because of the number of times we’ve sold items to customers without them placing an order on-line. Every time this happens our stock figures become more inaccurate and at some point this will inevitably lead to us advertising items we actually no longer have . . . that’s when customers get really annoyed. "Collection In Person" was designed to save very local customers the shipping costs on smaller orders - not as a faster way to place an order. However, the system wasn't really working as planned and add to this the lack of storage space for orders awaiting collection, and you can see it's not helping our business grow.
Well there you have it . . . I can only hope that our regulars reading this will know us well enough to realise that we're not being disinterested or taking business for granted, but that we're facing up to an issue which was affecting the other 99% of orders. We greatly appreciate orders from all customers, whether from the
We can only ask your understanding as we continue to improve our range, prices, delivery times and service.
Warmest regards,
Alan
