I appreciate that Royal Mail is about as close to daylight robbery as it gets but I also do not get the shipping scheme you operate…
essentially, as far as I can tell, you charge a flat cost of £3 per order for shipment to a UK address, no matter what is ordered.
… I don’t think it makes much sense when I suspect most peope in this hobby are likely buying ad hoc pieces for their projects, as they require. And surely, when it fits the large letter format, and the order value is below £20, the £3 charge is unwarranted?
But anyhow, initially I thought, fair enough it’s no big deal, but I was irritated to see that you offer free shipping on a restricted range via amazon and ebay, where you have extra overheads.
So, I don’t quite understand why this policy is in place, and thought I would put it out there for discussion…
The £3 shipping cost includes labour (order printing/picking/packing/handling), packing materials (jiffys/boxes/toner/labels), and VAT (20%) - not just the raw postage cost.
We’re also limited in that our shop solution doesn’t allow us to define shipping rates based on volume (which would be required for determining large letter sizes) so we have to base our rate tables on either weight or value (in the end we chose value as it mapped better to our courier pricing options).
Hope that makes sense and sorry it’s not been ideal for you!
Edit: I notice I didn’t address the Amazon question - apologies for that :-) We use Amazon FBA where possible, this allows products listed on Amazon to ship with Amazon Prime hence free shipping (a condition of Amazon Prime). When we sell to Amazon it is more akin to stocking a distributor (we send them 50 units of X and they handle the rest) so we can operate at lower margins as much less labour is involved.