Weldricks continually reviews carriage costs with our delivery partners and trying to strike the correct balance between cost and quality of service.
Due to the ongoing shortfall in funding to the pharmacy sector of over £1.1bn from central government and increased costs from couriers, wholesale partners and the costs of doing business such as National Living Wage, we have reluctantly taken the decision to review our delivery pricing policies.
For over 7 years we have maintained our delivery costs balancing our overall charges to our customers and subsidising postage against our costs and setting our free delivery cut off points at market leading low rates, however, following recent increases in costs this is no longer sustainable.
The changes we have made are to:
- increase standard delivery cost has been increased to £3.49
- increase our cut off for free delivery to £40.
- Introduce weight restrictions for free delivery
- Increase our rates for some orders to the highlands and islands that require specialist delivery methods.
- Increase in the Price of DPD services to reflect the cost of these delivery methods
- Delivery of Prescription only Medicines (not including Controlled drugs and Fridge items) for £4.19
To explain how we arrived at our current delivery price structure; we provide a delivery service with tracking included because we feel this is essential to give our customers peace of mind that their purchases can be monitored from point of despatch until delivery.
In the case of medicines, we also have a professional obligation from the GPhC to take measured steps to ensure medication reaches the intended recipient. We have never offered the cheaper, untracked delivery options for these reasons.
For delivery of temperature sensitive and high risk medicines, such as controlled drugs that pose a danger if they are not given to the intended recipient we use DPD services with a PIN the price of these deliveries have increased to take into account delivery cost increases and the cost of additional packaging required.
We do continue to subsidise our postage and packing to be competitive because we appreciate you have many choices of supplier and we regularly check our competitors, as a result of these checks, our charges for carriage continue to be less than the daily total cost charged to us.
While I have always had the support of our management in incurring this loss, I also have to take care that postage and packing does not lose us too much money as that would have an impact on our offering of low retail prices.
We are proud to be a UK based company and we fully pay UK taxes but that does mean we do not have the ability that some offshore based companies have of setting lower taxes against operating costs such as postage.
We continue to review and innovate with our delivery options and services and have recently introduced DPD PickUp for convenient local pickup at a location near you for a low introductory price.
As a Fully UK owned business we pride that compared to some of our competitors who are highly mechanised, larger multi-national businesses who offshore some of their taxes, our business remains a family owned, Yorkshire based business that employs local staff and fully pays UK taxes rather than an impersonal, highly mechanised stock handling business that removes the staff from the processes.
Our expert customer care team alongside our technician and pharmacists are available on the phone, by chat or on email to answer your queries and do whatever we can reasonably do to make sure you receive the right medicines at the right time to support you and your pets health needs.
Allan Green
Head of e-commerce