Changes to shipping


Summary: Immediate PDF delivery! 

We’ve moved to weight-based shipping. Multiple book orders now cheaper to ship!

As part of the new website development we took the first close look at shipping that we’ve taken in… pretty much forever. The old site didn’t have the flexibility to offer well-modelled shipping rates.

Also, shipping costs had gone up a lot over the past decade, but we hadn’t changed our prices to keep track. The short version is that we have been losing a fair amount of money on shipping, and we can’t afford that! So, for the new site, we’ve based the shipping calculator on the actual costs of shipping.

The great news is that for a huge number of orders, the cost of shipping is going DOWN by a lot! Ordering a few books at a time will in many cases mean that the cost of shipping plummets:

  • 3 books sent to Germany for example, will cost €15, over €5 less than in the old system.
  • Ordering all the Adventures in Middle-earth™ books to Germany would have cost over €50 under the old system – now it is also €15!
  • Single book orders will be a bit more expensive on the new site, but are charged at cost. With some cunning ordering, or grouping orders with friends, you should be able to get your books shipped much more cheaply than before.

Our recent relocation to Ireland has also impacted the cost of shipping to the UK, but orders of multiple books will also end up much cheaper than they were in the old system – you’ll pay a maximum of £9 shipping up to 30kg of books!

We’ve also introduced more secure, and often cheaper, courier shipping options in the EU and UK, and will be expanding those options to other regions in the coming months.

Pre-orders see a huge improvement – the PDF code is now included in the order receipt email, so you don’t have to wait for us to manually send it out to you. This is such good news, especially with big pre-orders where it was a real challenge for us to get through all the orders quickly. The shipping cost will be a little higher, as we have been losing a lot of money on shipping pre-orders. They all go out individually as they arrive, so the base shipping cost needs to be paid even if they are ordered with other items. In most cases it would be the difference of a few quid, but as you can imagine with pre-orders in the thousands it adds up to a lot!

We’ll be monitoring the prices from now on, and doing everything we can to keep shipping as cost-effective as possible.

And finally, we are so grateful to all of our customers for their support over the years! If you find any issues with the new process then please get in touch and let us know, we’ll do our best to fix it.