December is the busiest month of the year for retailers, and most of you will have sourced all of your Christmas stock before the month begins. But not everyone plans ahead, and in the current economic climate, many retailers may be holding off on placing large orders until they see how early sales go.

Back in the days when we used Royal mail for our deliveries, this might have been a problem, as they are notoriously slow over the Christmas period, making the delivery times of orders unpredictable. This year however, we do not foresee any such problems. We’ve been using DHL very successfully for many months now, and we expect December delivery times to be the same as previous months.

Over 90% of orders delivered to UK mainland addresses arrive the day after they are shipped, and we see this continuing over the coming busy weeks.

The Irish VAT rate will be rising by half a percent on the first of December, to 21.5%. This will affect all customers, apart from those in EU countries other than Ireland who are registered for VAT. VAT registered customers can still enter their VAT number on the checkout page to remove VAT prior to paying.

The VAT increase is outside our control, and will add approximately  £0.50 per £100 spent to the cost of each order.

We’ve had some downtime on the website over the past couple of days. This was for brief periods of 10-15 minutes only, but it can be distracting for customers, especially when they are in the middle of placing large orders for Christmas, or even worse, about to check out.

In order to keep our customers up to date when problems like this occur, we’ve started a Website Status Blog. This blog is completely separate from our website, so in the event that this site goes down, it will remain unaffected.

The purpose of the blog is to detail any downtime or site problems, and provide updates on when we expect them to be resolved. The blog also provides email and phone contact details, which would be unavailable if our main site were down.

Regular customers may wish to bookmark the new blog. Hopefully, there will be little or no reason to use it, but the reality is that no matter how good your technical operation, problems do occur, usually at the most inconvenient times.