P+P pricing - Updated April 2022 [further update March 2023]

You can find up to date info on current prices on the DKY Postage Info Page online.

We are often asked why we do not do free postage on all orders. There are quite a few reasons but the main one is that we prefer to be honest with our prices. Many 'free' P+P sites charge more for all their items to cover the cost of postage and have a minimum order value so they don't lose out. We would rather charge the right price for our items and allow customers to buy as little as they want. It also means that if you buy a lot from those 'free' P+P sites you are paying more and more for your "postage". Larger orders with us get genuinely FREE P+P on orders over £40. More on that later.

In our original post we stated that we get asked if we can combine orders from the three CPU Enterprises websites. While this is still not possible at the moment, we do hope to be able to combine Dianne's Knitting Yarns and Craft Bits at some point in the future. The new Free Postage Limit of £40 just introduced for Craft Bits will make this easier. Our Craft Kits website uses a different P+P system so it is unlikely they would be included unless it had a major overhaul. More on that later

DKY and Craft Bits have a flat standard maximum UK P+P rate of £3.30 [£3.60 from April 2023]. That rate stays the same whether you order one 25g ball of yarn, a ton of yarn, one pair of toy eyes or lots of packs of felt.

When DKY first went online we felt very strongly that all costs should be up front and simple to understand - one of the reasons we chose to include VAT in all our prices. A good side effect of having a flat standard P+P rate is that it works like a discount for larger orders. We do occasionally get asked to discount larger orders - although one persons large is another persons average. As the P+P costs already work like a discount, we are not able to give further price reductions. We also pride ourselves on always giving the best price we can on all our stock.

How did DKY choose their P+P prices?
When we first went online in 2000 the P+P was £1.95 which we changed to £2.50 in 2007, £2.95 in 2012, £3.20 in 2014 and finally £3.30 in 2020 [£3.60 from April 2023]. Craft Bits was a little different but has recently matched DKY in P+P prices.

The original price was worked out by how much it would cost someone to go into our town centre to buy yarn by bus or by car (parking costs & petrol). We thought that was a fair way to do it. But over the years we have had to use the Royal Mail prices as more of guide. Which is why some years ago we added a smaller price for Pattern Leaflet and Pattern Book only orders. More on that in a bit.

What does that £3.30 [£3.60 from April 2023] cover for DKY and Craft Bits?
One of the other reasons we have a standard rate for all orders is that there are some costs that all orders have - large or small. Printing costs, Card Charges (flat 2.5% on every order), paper, mail bags, envelopes, office staff time, etc. The rest goes towards the Royal Mail Postage costs, but has never covered it completely.

In 2012 we added lower prices for Pattern Leaflet and Pattern Book only orders. This is because we can use the lower Royal Mail Large Letter Prices to send these orders. Those prices of £1.50 [£1.60 from April 2023] and £2.50 [£2.60 from April 2023] respectively have not changed since then.

In 2015 we added a new feature to DKY - free postage on UK orders over £40. We did an experiment over many months to see if we could sustain this from the profit of larger orders and decided we could. Craft Bits had a lower free P+P limit but, as stated above, has now changed to £40 to match.

Craft Kits is completely different.
It was our third site and a bit of an experiment in both design, layout and P+P.

Kits are obviously a standard weight per kit so it was easy to use the Shopping Basket to work out the P+P price. We couldn't use this for DKY as they have many thousands of goods with many different weights. CB couldn't use it as they again have many different weights. For CB there are also many different types of packaging (which all have a different weights) which differ for different pack sizes, even for the same goods.

The price of each kit on the CK site is usually cheaper than on sites which have free P+P and are usually cheaper than the RRP. When the P+P is added the prices usually come up the same or less than those on the 'free' P+P sites.

There is a minimum P+P price of £1.50 [£1.60 from April 2023] on the CK site, but you can get up to 90g of kits for that price, which is quite a few Mouseloft kits for instance. The Basket work out the P+P prices as you order, so you always know exactly what you will be paying, no nasty surprises at checkout 😲

Therefore, because of the different P+P charges, it is impossible to combine orders from Craft Kits with the other 2.

In our previous P+P blog we stated there were other reasons we could not combine orders, such as such as different booking systems, staff and warehouses. This is no longer the case, due to the Covid19 Pandemic we brought all stock into the main warehouse and all staff now process orders for all three websites. So at some point in the future we will look again at combining DKY and CB.

In April 2022 Royal Mail First Class prices (and the additional fuel subsidy) jumped quite a bit, so we had to decide if we were going to put up P+P prices. We did a survey with some of our most regular customers and posted on our Forum. The options were to leave the prices the same but send by Second Class Post or raise the prices to £3.99 plus adjust how many patterns and books were included in the lower P+P prices. The overwhelming opinion of our customers was to keep the price the same and send by Second Class, which is what we started to do on 4th April 2022. [The prices jump by quite a bit in April 2023 and the fuel subsidy is now 8% before VAT, which adds even more. So we have reluctantly had to put up all prices as shown above. The amount we have put the prices up is actually less than the price has risen to us, we will always do our best to keep our prices down.]

There is a surprising added benefit to sending by Second Class Post. First Class has a target of next day delivery and Royal Mail are supposed to deliver a high percentage of those within that target. If parcels are going to miss that target they are more likely to just put them to one side and make sure the next days parcels get there in time rather than both days missing the target. Those delayed parcels can then be delivered at any time as they have already breached the target and they don't monitor exactly how much they miss it by. We saw this in action recently when a 1st class parcel took 2 weeks to be delivered but parcels sent later that week arrived on time. As 2nd class do not have such a strict target (2 working days and less percent have to hit it) they are more likely to actually arrive in 2 working days.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above please do let us know.