Businesses are run by people and this business is run by a family that not only wants to make a difference but wants to give an exceptional experience ( we don't always succeed but we do try our best) and a common point raised was “why don't you sell on Amazon, I always buy from Amazon because of free delivery” , now we won't sell on Amazon ( that's a long tale for another day) so we thought “Ok let's do the same thing”
This isn't the first time we have tried free delivery, in fact it's the third time we have tried it , but in the past it always came with additional issues, sometimes cost, sometimes environmental and sometimes both, but we really thought we had nailed it this time but sadly the same issues kept cropping up.
Let's start with the first issue, there is no such thing as free delivery, it has to be paid for, but our thought process was we would absorb the costs and this would encourage more businesses to buy our sustainable plant based products and it would also provide for a much better customer experience and both of these did happen, our customers loved it, our sales went up , so why wasn't it a huge success, it was groundhog day again as we changed how we delivered it but the problems of free shipping remained, these are
Cost
We tried in the past sending the cheapest Royal Mail 2nd class option, but we found that deliveries were nearly always late, if they arrived at all , so we knew we were going to have to send it by a trackable premium service like 48 hour trackable, but this costs us £3.45 and a bag to use with it costs us at least 15p so we were paying £3.60, but sometimes our profits per item can be as little as £1.00 so the sums didn't add up, unless we no longer wanted to be the UK's last British owned plant based packaging company.
These figures were even worse when the item ordered was over 2kg as we currently pay at least £6.93 and that's without the packaging to get it to you safely.
Conclusion - The economics just didn't stack up.
Environmental
Last time we tried it , order got smaller , which meant more vehicles, more carbon and a very poor outcome environmentally and sadly this was the case this time, we sent three times the typical volumes but these were all small orders and so our standard carbon footprint per delivery went from 221 grams of Co2 to almost 1.8 kg, not a good thing for a company based around reducing carbon.
This also meant that we sent 300% more with Royal Mail, which sadly meant we had a large increase in late orders, missing orders and annoyed customers ( we want to support Royal Mail but they don't always make it easy) and we had a 300% decrease in orders sent courier, which led to extra fees for being below shipping levels and drivers turning up with very little going out.
Conclusion - The economics, we failed our own internal customer satisfaction targets and the environmentals didn't stack up.
It's why we have come to the conclusion that something free is not as well appreciated as something you pay for , so we have decided to subsidise our deliveries and offer a subscription delivery model.
Fingers crossed this will work as a better more sustainable model for The Pure Option, our customers and the environment.
Feedback is always welcome, feel free to tell us what you thought.
