Free Delivery on All Chocolates

'Chip In' Explanation

You might’ve noticed recently that we’ve added a ‘help us out’ option at the shipping section on our checkout. For any of you who didn’t catch our post about it on social media, here’s a quick explanation of why we did that.

Ever since Finlay founded the business in 2016, one of his core principles has been that amazing chocolate is for everyone, not just a select few. With this is mind, we always keep our prices as low as we can afford to. We also never ever want delivery fees to become a barrier to anyone, so we foot postage bills ourselves. This is something we chose to do and continue to choose to do - it’s a business cost like any other.

But delivery isn’t really free, in fact it’s quite expensive, and that’s totally understandable! There are so many hard-working people behind every single letter and parcel that shows up on the doorstep, and these people need to be paid. The last year has been crazy and difficult for everyone. Thankfully, we were able to get through it with the help of toilet roll subscription services (who knew?); shiny new tins for our banana loaves; dumbbells in lieu of gym attendance and of course; chocolate – all dutifully brought to us by our post men and women. In fact, the UK had 2.8 billion parcels delivered last year! That simply cannot be done for free.

The Amazon effect has had such a massive impact on consumer expectations. Until relatively recently we all accepted that delivery fees were the price we paid for the convenience, choice and ease of comparison of online shopping. Now, so many huge companies have the resources to offer free, often next-day, delivery at relatively little cost that that’s almost what we’ve come to expect anytime we shop online. Small businesses can’t realistically do this affordably, and delivery fees so often hit them harder. A survey conducted last year found that an unbelievable 73% of people are put off buying something altogether by delivery fees and that’s a really big problem for any company trying to compete in the online marketplace. Ultimately, smaller businesses with fewer resources are often forced to raise prices to accommodate free shipping, or face losing customers to bigger companies.

So, we want to opt out of the ‘free delivery’ myth. We’re still offering all of our customers free delivery on every order, large or small, but we just want to acknowledge that there are people working hard behind the scenes and we need to pay them for all of the great work that they do. You can choose to chip in if you like – that’s entirely up to you. If you don’t want to or you feel unable for any reason, then we are more than happy to pay.

Finlay outside the chocolate kitchen with our local postman John.