Delivery Service & Costs.
Compared to our direct competitors, Zenzu’s prices for delivering Chinese furniture are relatively high; indeed customers often balk at the price we charge for delvery. However in practice we make a loss on delivery. Our competitors and other companies also make a loss on delivery and in fact cover the cost of delivery through higher product pricing. Call is a moral decision or an bug bear but we actually want to represent to the custromer an idea of some of the cost and value in the specialist delivery service that we provide. In our small way we want to show that delivery is not a two-penny worth commodity but a very high cost provision.
For some reason there is an expectation that delivery is a commodity that should be low cost or even free. When purchasing from a local high street a store can offer local delivery at a very low cost as their own staff can probably deliver and the cost of fuel is almost insignificant. However when running a web based Chinese furniture company that needs to deliver nationwide the cost of delivery becomes a huge part of the annual overheads. For some reason consumers in the UK have become used to or expect product delivery to be extremely low in cost; this may be a legacy from the era when delivery was only provided by local stores or may be the effect of the likes of John Lewis delivering for free with their own nationwide distribution fleet (a cost for them that is allocated elsewhere on the balance sheet).
However, for a small online Chinese furniture retailer such as ourselves the cost for each individual delivery is very high. We have an excellent partner, Motorlink Distribution, who provide a specialist service for us and we know for a fact that they charge very fair and reasonable rates. With our Oriental furniture it is not possible to use national courier companies or palettise deliveries as the products must be handled with care and delivieries must be made to residences. A fair comparison to give the idea of actual cost is the amount charged by removals companies. Bearing that in mind you can probably imagine the cost of providing a 2 person attended vehicle to load and unload; based on this fact it is not difficult to see how expensive it would be to employ two people to deliver a Chinese Wardrobe or any other price of large Oriental furniture to the North of England for example.
For this reason, to be able to make any profit whatsoever we can only offer a single person delivery service, even then absorbing some of the costs ourselves, and are also reliant on Motorlink to coincide our deliveries with those of other clients to the same regions. Chinese furniture deliveries to the South-East are of course no problem, but remote places, especially Scotland cause us great problems as customers often have to wait for long periods until there is a delivery run to their particular part of Scotland.
As a small provider of Chinese furniture we try to be as flexible as possible in our approach and would love to be able to provide a full 2 person delivery service to every part of the country within a few days. However to run a successful and profitable company it is unfortunately impossible to do so. What is more with the credit crunch now on and the concurrent rise in fuel prices, retailers such as oursleves are under a great deal of stress. We are sure our Oriental furniture sales will remain strong but delivery prices have almost doubled in the last year and that is not a cost we can pass on to our customers in the current climate.
We will survive the current economic downturn and the feeling is that we will emerge the stronger for it at the other end. With our low, flexible overheads we have the a business model for our chinese furniture company to survive and thrive.
