Happy New Year to all our wonderful customers and website users!
As we're sure a lot of us do, the New Year has brought about a moment of reflection for us. We take a look back at our very hectic Christmas period and sigh a very large sigh of relief. It is always strange moving from our busiest month of the year (ten fold) to our quietest month of the year! But it does give us plenty of time to think, look back and move forward.
As well as starting our Christmas 2022 planning and thinking about how to improve the Christmas customer experience we also take a look at what we're offering on a day to day basis.
One of the biggest things we've been thinking about for a while now is our website ordering service where we provide local delivery and click & collect for our local customers. It was a service we initially set up very ad-hoc back at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic in March 2020 in response to customers not being able to leave their houses to come to the shop.
We wanted to offer a lifeline to our customers who couldn't leave their houses due to shielding or isolating who still wanted to support local business; enjoy our delicious products; shun the big corporates (who do charge for some of their home delivery slots); and use a service that didn't cost and was quick from ordering to delivery.
While the service has been very well received having been praised a lot over the last couple of years by our customers we need to create a model that is sustainable long term for the business so we can carry on providing it.
During lockdown months we see incredible numbers of deliveries going out each day making it highly sustainable, albeit still with a significant cost to the business - vehicle depreciation, petrol, delivery driver costs, shop staff costs, packaging, the list goes on. However this cost can be off-set by the higher website sales we naturally make during any lockdown.
Unfortunately as lockdown restrictions ease we immediately see an impact on the number of local deliveries going out and we can go quickly from 20 deliveries in a day to only 2 the next.
Moving forward as lockdowns lift completely we unfortunately cannot carry on providing the service for free. So we have introduced a small fee of £3 for every local delivery made, while keeping the zero minimum order value. For this £3 you receive delivery direct to your door; you can order as little as a loaf of bread; and it can be delivered next day if you order on the morning.
We believe this is still an incredible service from a small local business and one that still provides great value for money for our fantastic customers.
We hope you carry on enjoying our Local Delivery Service!
