November is the busiest month for wholesalers, as their retail customers prepare for the Christmas period. It’s rare indeed that a successful retailer holds off on placing large orders until December. Last minute top-up orders are a different thing entirely.

Thanks to our arrangements with DHL, we are confident that our December delivery times will remain at 1-2 days across most of the UK and Ireland. However, as with all online companies, we do have a cut off point for Christmas orders. To ensure delivery early in Christmas weak, customers should ensure that any last minute orders are placed and paid for by Wednesday, 17th December. If you are paying by telephone rather than Paypal, you should place your order early in the day to allow enough time for us to call you the same day. Deliveries placed on Wednesday will be dispatched either the next day, or, more likely, on Friday morning.

In common with most wholesalers, we will be shutting down for our Christmas break from 19th December - 5th January. Orders can still be placed during this period, as the website will be running and fully up to date throughout, but these orders will not be processed or dispatched until January 5th.

We’d like to wish all our customers a happy and a very prosperous Christmas.

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.

All of our jewellery is displayed in reverse order, with the newest items appearing first, and the oldest items appearing last. This means that a wide range of different styles and prices could appear side by side. For example, when browsing our Necklaces, you might easily be presented with our most expensive items at £7 - £8 on the same page as some of our cheapest items, selling for little more than £1.

This is all well and good, as regular customers who are familiar with our catalogue will always see the freshest, newest lines first, but it doesn’t help when your budget or your end customer is geared towards one end of the price spectrum or the other.

With this in mind, we’ve added some extra sorting options to our catalogue pages that allow you to change the order items appear in. The default is as it is now, which is newest items first. Two further options: Highest Priced and Lowest Priced, will sort the catalogue by the cost of each item.

This means that you can easily look at all of our cheapest or most expensive lines side by side. If you’re shopping within a particular price range, this should make your browsing a whole lot easier. Once you change the sort order to the option that suits you, it will be remembered for your current visit to our website. The next time you visit, the default of newest items first will again apply.

Sourcing new suppliers is not easy. You never know what you’re going to get, or how you’re going to to be treated. There’s really no way you can know for sure what a supplier is like before you buy from them. You can’t ask other retailers, because they’ll be keeping their best suppliers close to their chest. Sadly, you can’t even depend on the company itself to be up front with you about everything - they may gloss over delivery charges, or tell you they have stock they don’t actually have, just to get your business. Shortsighted, but true nonetheless.

With this in mind, we’ve put together a Customer Testimonials Page. We haven’t edited any of the comments, beyond correcting a few spelling errors and removing the odd word that might identify the person or business being quoted. As already mentioned, retailers do not like other retailers knowing where they source their stock. Our hope is that this page will help alleviate some of the fears buyers may have before placing that first order.

If you have any comments you’d like to make about our business or stock that you feel might help your fellow retailers, please contact us and we’ll be happy to post them on our testimonials page.

Anyone who tried to browse the website or place orders on Saturday will have noticed that the site was down for much of the day. This was caused by some maintenance work carried out overnight that led to problems on our server. The site remained inaccessible throughout the day, until 7:30 in the evening.

A side effect of these problems was that many emails sent to us over this time went astray. If you did try to contact us on Saturday, and haven’t heard back from us yet, please get in touch again.

Our regular customers will know that we often make changes and improvements to our site. It was only a month ago that we added a Popular Jewellery Items Page, and it’s proven to be one of the most visited pages on the site. We do listen to feedback from customers, and many of the changes we make are in response to that feedback.

With that in mind, we’ve added some new navigation links to make browsing the Catalogue a little easier. Where before, the only way to see our stock was to use the Next and Previous links on each page, now it is possible to jump pages more quickly, and to easily move to the end of the catalogue.

The new links make it easy to see how many pages of stock we have, and provide a simple mechanism to jump to the oldest items. The image above shows that we have 27 pages of Costume Necklaces. As we always display our stock in reverse order, with the newest items at the front and the oldest at the back, these new links allow customers to quickly look at our oldest items in stock - the most likely to be almost sold out.

We’ve added a new page to the website listing links to jewellery and business related organisations that we feel might be useful to our customers. These links include official organisations such as the Birmingham and Sheffield Assay Offices, along with less well known organisations such as The Silver Society, The London Metal Exchange, and The British Jewellers Association.

Many of these sites are worth more than just a casual glance, as they do contain a wealth of information.

Sheffield Assay Office

Birmingham Assay Office

More About Hallmarking

The Silver Society

The Hallmarking Convention

The Jewellery Distributors’ Association

British Jewellers Association

London Metal Exchange

UK Business Forum

OFT: Distance Selling Regulations

Jewellery on Wikipedia

Jewellery Cleaning - an overview

How to Clean Silver

How to Repair Silver Jewellery

Jewellery on Hub Pages - Random bits and pieces.

Jewellery on eBay

Jewellery Packaging - Bags, boxes, etc.

If anyone can recommend other sites that might be of interest to those in the Jewellery trade, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s never easy to know what to buy. The public are fickle creatures at best, who want one thing one day, and something else the next. What was popular three or four months ago, is old fashioned today.

So how do you decide which items to order, and which have passed their sell by date? Our shelf life for Fashion and Costume Jewellery is not that long. We tend to order just enough of each line to last about four months, and many of the more popular lines sell out within two months, so you’re unlikely to find last years fashions on our site.

But that doesn’t help you decide what is right for your customers today. Necklaces that sell well in Edinburgh may not sell so well in Cardiff or London. And what sells in Ireland… well, let’s just say that the Irish are in a class all their own when it comes to fashion jewellery.

You could buy one of each item. But then you might find yourself left with many single, unsold items. You could use your experience to choose what you think will sell, and buy heavily in just those lines. But then you might be wrong, and be left with dozens of similar items that your local customers do not want.

To help you decide, we’ve put together a new Popular Items Page. This page is updated many times a day, and shows you which items fellow retailers across the UK are buying. The page lists the last 60 items purchased in reverse order, and in doing so allows you to draw upon the experience of jewellery retailers across the country when you make your decision (jewellery, accessory, and gift shop owners, party planners, market traders, eBay sellers and jewellery websites).

Should you buy lots of cheap items for a pound or two, or invest in some of the more expensive sterling silver bracelets and rings? By keeping an eye on this page, daily or weekly, you should gain a broader insight into what’s selling up and down the land, and make these sorts of questions easier to answer.

We’d appreciate any feedback you might have on this new page. Does it help you when deciding what to order? Could we extend it in any way?

Click here for the Popular Jewellery Items Page