Important: Shipping costs are changing

We have good news and bad news.

Bad news: Due to courier price increases, our shipping costs are rising by an average of 8%.

Good news: We're introducing new shipping rates to help offset the price increase, and even offer lower shipping costs in some cases! 

These new rates will go live from 25th March 2019.

Prices for our previous shipping services have risen by approximately 8% in line with price increases with our couriers. That's the bad news, the good news is that we've introduced new shipping rates that offer cheaper shipping options:

  • NEW Royal Mail 48 & 48 Recorded services to the UK.
  • NEW lightweight rates for certain products to the UK.
  • NEW tiered pricing for shipping by courier to Europe.
  • NEW cheaper US rates through USPS Recorded service.

We've managed to sneak that last one into this update, and not to brag but it's already being called a 'game changer'.

Cheaper, faster shipping to the US?! Too good to be true.

Actually, it's not! For some time we've been trialling this USPS service with large volume customers very successfully, so we've partnered with a UK based company to make the same service available to everyone. 

We still print everything in house, and ship from here. But if your order is bound for the US it'll be couriered to the country and injected directly into the USPS network for tracked delivery to your customer.

That's a quicker delivery time, and a tracked service, with the same quality printing from Inkthreadable, but a new LOWER rate. You can check these rates for yourself on our Shipping Costs page.

Royal Mail 48 & 48 Recorded services

Both of these new services ship to the UK, and offer cheaper rates in a tradeoff for delivery times being a little longer (2 to 5 days as opposed to the 1 to 3 days for Royal Mail 24). 

If you (and your customers) are happy to wait a little longer for the parcel to arrive, then great! Cheaper rates for everyone. If not, you can always offer both services alongside each other and let your customer decide which to go for. 

Tiered prices for orders shipping by courier to Europe

We've split Europe into 5 Zones, each containing specific European countries and a cost to ship to them. For the most part, each of these zones is now cheaper to ship to by courier. 

Zones 1 to 4 are cheaper, starting at just £8.70 inc VAT. Zone 5 is now slightly more expensive than the previous rate, rising to £22.75 from £22.00 before the update. 

How the new lightweight rate works

In a final bid to reduce shipping costs as much as possible, we've added a new lightweight tier for shipping phone cases, morfs and socks. Other products are too heavy to take advantage of this rate, so if your customer orders any of these products on its own it will ship with the lightweight rate.

This rate is available for the UK and US only. It's limited to these countries since it can only be achieved using the cheapest domestic rates available, and we ship domestic as standard in the UK (we're based here) and now inject directly into the USPS domestic network for the US (with our new service).

Okay, so how do I take advantage of these new rates?

These rates are already available when placing manual orders through Inkthreadable. When checking out, you'll see the new rates listed as shipping options, so just select which you'd like to use. 

The lightweight and Europe courier rates are a passive update, so if your order qualifies for them you'll be charged the correct amount automatically.

If your store is integrated, you have a bit of work ahead of you since you'll need to update your store's shipping options in line with our new rates. But don't worry, we've written guides that detail the process for updating from your current shipping rates to the new ones. You can find them all in our Help Centre. 

Find out more

The new shipping costs are outlined on our Shipping Costs page.

If you have any questions about these changes please contact our support team via phone, email or live chat. 

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