Delivery Cost & Getting Value for Money

British Corner Shop is the British supermarket with worldwide delivery. Today I'm going to discuss delivery charges and how to get the best value for money when placing an order with British Corner Shop.

The cost of delivery depends on a few different factors:

1. Which Country you're having your order delivered to.
2. How heavy the products you are ordering are.
3. How bulky the items that make up your order are.
4. The number of parcels that your order will need to be packed

The first item on this list you can do little to affect (unless you move to a country with a cheaper shipping rate!), but we'll assume that you're happy where you are for the purposes of this article.

Points 2, 3 and 4 however can be managed to give you the best possible value on delivery. By optimising your shopping basket so that you fill exactly one or two boxes, you can achieve excellent value per Kg.

The good news is that the BCS website works it all out for you, and presents a one line "Shipping Optimiser" at the bottom of your shopping basket. This does a calculation of the weights and bulkiness of all the items in your basket, and shows a graphic of how full your current box (or parcel) is.

Quite simply then, you can get the best possible value for delivery cost by filling up a box to the top, and you can see exactly how much space you've got left for additional items by checking the 0% to 100% full graphic.

Take France for example, the delivery cost per box is £11.99. In an extreme case, if you order just one item then you'll be getting poor value for delivery. Add up to some 25 - 30Kg of shopping to your basket and you'll see that the delivery cost is still the same £11.99. This is simple economies of scale at work.

However, at some point around 25-30Kg you'll notice that the box is full, and you spill over into a second box. This will make the delivery cost £11.99 x 2 = £23.98.

Fortunately you can easily remove one or two items until you see the graphic indicator switch back down to just one full box, returning the delivery cost to £11.99.

So by having full visibility of how your parcel is filling up in this way, you can really optimise your order to gain the best possible value for delivery.

Different countries work on slightly different systems, many have a fixed rate per 30Kg box charge as described above, but some work on a more progressive sliding scale. The optimiser graphic still applies, but will move more quickly through "brackets" rather than boxes.

If your country happens to have a bracketed shipping cost, you can still make sure you are optimising the delivery cost by stopping at the top of a bracket rather than at the bottom.

I hope that has given you some insight into how to get better value for delivery. Fortunately BCS has some excellent delivery rates to begin with, so enjoy your shopping and of course your British food.

It's also worth mentioning once again that British Corner Shop currently have 20% off all delivery prices, until the 26th January 2010.