Free P&P is a lie - I'm making some changes

Free P&P is a lie might sound like a heck of a statement, but it is true. Regardless of who you are ordering from, all businesses have to pay someone else for the postage/van/bike to get things to you, and for the packaging to keep it safe along the way. 

Often you are paying when you order something with free P&P,  it's just you can't see the cost rolled into the single price you pay. Or the business sucks up a bit of the cost to give you a more appealing offer/free P&P triggers for purchases over a certain amount - designed to entice buyers into spending more. 

For a while I've been combining rolling in and sucking up the costs, offering you free UK P&P on my Etsy shop. But with the latest increase in postage prices, I've got to stop.

The short version - What's changing

From Monday February 1st, I'll be...

• Swapping to second class post as a standard.
• Some items in my shop will have a UK P&P charge of 90p, with additional items at 25p
• Other items will remain "free" in the UK.

That's sort of all you need to know, but making this big of a change (which still doesn't pass on all the costs to you), it feels fair to explain what's going on behind it. Read on for a look into small biz life!

The long version - Peek behind the maths

I'd known for a while that my P&P was out of balance, and I did tweak international prices, but 2020 didn't feel like the year to drop major changes on folks in the UK! Royal Mail's price increases in January 2021 have been the catalyst.

Let's look at what the UK postage and packaging costs to send you a standard item, let's say a £7 Cat pin

1st class large letter stamp: £1.29
Padded envelope: 11P 
Bag: 2p
Gift tag: 1p
Bag closing sticker: 4p
Protective tissue paper: 1p
Mounting card: 8p
Discount code card: 12p

(I'm not counting a newsletter card 25p, or sticker 6p on the outside of the envelope, or address label 4p because these don't go into/onto everything I send, so could skew the maths)

​Postage and packaging for one item costs me £1.68 (Or, if you include the bits I omitted, £2.03)

Postage and packaging for one item costs me £1.68 (Or, if you include the bits I omitted, £2.03)

To send an order of multiple items it becomes £1.83 just for the stamp and an A5 box, then plus 28p for each item . (Assuming that the box and content's weight doesn't go over 100g, because as the weight goes up, so too does the cost of the stamp.)
​
There's another wrinkle though, in that selling on Etsy they take fees of £1.19. So the Etsy fee on top of the P&P means I finally get £4.19 of your £7. But of course, cost of materials and overheads like tools, lighting, website fees, insurance and other things also need to come from that. The final profit I make from selling you a £7 pin translates to just enough money to buy a medium sized posh coffee, depending on where I ordered it from. 

Hopefully you can see that asking for 90p to send you that cat pin will make a massive difference for me.

Why will I still offer free P&P on some items?

Given the example above, why don't I whack P&P onto everything I sell online?

When I make a new piece, I decide if I'll offer it to bricks and mortar shops, or if I will keep it PJ only. If I plan to offer a piece out, I work out the retail price to include a wholesale price, and that shops working on a sale or return basis will take anything up to 40% commission. Those are the pieces I have enough 'slack' to roll the P&P into when I'm making a direct sale to your happy face. ​

...whichever pieces you buy, you're always paying a little bit toward the P&P, and helping me have a viable business you can enjoy for years to come.

Why eat up my slack? Because as we said at the start, free P&P is a more appealing offer, and it may be that a buyer decides not to go for an item with a P&P charge, but buy something with "free" P&P instead .

​Then I've still made a sale, the buyer is happy, and you, my lovely clever peeps, are now wise enough to realise that whichever pieces you buy, you're always paying a little bit toward the P&P, and helping me have a viable business you can enjoy for years to come.