Postage Costs ?

1968neil

Senior Member
I'm not one to complain, however........

Why is the UK Postage so expensive ?
£6.00 + Vat to send one IC is a bit rich...
I've just ordered a 40X2 and it's £13.93 inc postage.
I can send the same package for less than a pound tracked via royal mail.......

This is slowly becoming an expensive past time when you consider that rival platforms are much much cheaper.
Rant over
 

Technical

Technical Support
Staff member
The royal mail 24 hour tracked service we use is not under £1, nowhere near £1 in fact. Please also bear in mind the cost of a new jiffy bag and the labour cost of packaging and handling a single chip. Microcontrollers are too thick to be sent via the cheaper Royal Mail letter rates.
We are constantly reviewing our postage rates and the aim is to break even (not make a profit) on the true realistic handling / postage costs.
 

oracacle

Senior Member
Why do people always forget that you have to pay people to do things?
I get it when people ask me to make things for them, their interests wain after I tell them to either provide the designs or they need to be paying £10 an hour for CAD time. The thing I'm currently working on has already taken over 50 hours of design work, will take over a week to 3D print the parts and at least a week to assemble them and the associated control electronics.

The problem is we are living in a world where we expect thing the next day for nothing, maybe an issue that things like amazon prime has caused (Yes I know you pay the monthly subscription however much that is) and small companies don't have the bulk buying power to drive down that cost of things like packaging. We need to be supporting the small guy, like RevEd, as they provide things that the big guys simply can not provide.

Also rival platforms - you mean like arduino? that is not the case. their boards are quite expensive to get one that isn't a bad knock off, and believe me there is a lot of them. Then there is teensy, they are on another level, a board with a 600mhz processor that contains multiple i2c buses, CAN buses, serial ports, built FPU, built RTC and more for £25 - that there is bargain, downside is, it's harder to develop for. Then STM32, where often basic programmes require things like system clock setup with the same cost outlay as arduino.

overall RevEd are pretty cheap for what they provide by comparison and its more of a flaw of the postal system and the systemic forgetfulness about paying people to do things.
 

papaof2

Senior Member
Some Chinese vendors are also moving into the "OMG" postage levels, with shipping on small things being more than the price of the item, as in $0.50USD price, $2.50USD shipping. A few vendors do bundle multiple small parts in one postage cost but others charge per-item postage even when the package of six is the same size as the package of one.

The US Post Office (predecessor to USPS) had Parcel Post which was slower than Priority Mail but for things that you didn't need in 2-3 days it was MUCH cheaper. The other package carriers (UPS, FedEx) have their alternatives to Priority Mail with the packages basically traveling "space avaiklable" between the carrier's hubs and the destination Post Office and USPS doing the "last leg" of the delivery. I've seen packages spend up to a week in "transit" from the FedEx or UPS hub to the USPS local hub - possibly waiting for the trailer to be full before they move it?

Me? I still have PICAXE projects (digital clock, thermostat controlled fan in an A/V cabinet) running more than 10 years later. While I have the bits to explore other microprocessors (Arduino, CHIP, even a Raspberry Pi web server) the cost + ease of programming make the PICAXE first choice for a number of projects - and I don't need to download a library from this-site-died-last-month.com to complete a project.
 

john2051

New Member
Hi,
I think also the 20% vat doesn't help customers either. When you consider taxes that people pay, it's staggering. It's not really fair to blame a company for postal charges.
Regards
john
 
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