Shipping.

What a ballache. Wow.

Right, the Royal Mail put their prices up a month or so ago (maybe longer, the near past has melded into one long slog), and we're having to too. We cut our prices to the bone so we can't afford to take the hit I'm afraid. We've followed the prices from Royal Mail quite consistently plus 50p for our packaging costs. So we now charge £3.50 for a small package, £6.15 for a medium package and £9.40 for bigger packages.

Royal Mail have really buggered it up for us because yarn, on the whole, is big but light. So we might have something that measures for a medium parcel but weighs for a small parcel (a ball of Grousemoor Aran) and we'd still be charged the medium parcel price. That's over twice as much whereas before it would have been £2.70. Brill! Thanks RM and Queenie - loving that work.

Our website allows us to either charge shipping by weight or price, not size. So I've had to take a punt that 500g will make a small parcel and over that will make a medium one. We won't get it right every time - so we will be losing some money in places but I must say that with our old pricing system we were losing money on every single order so this makes things better for us.

Now, I will also say that this smooooooooooooths out the postal prices considerably, we used to have about seven different prices dependent on weight but we now have three. Got to be a good thing.

I hope it works and that nobody's too angry with  us. There was a woman in the shop yesterday who kept trying to haggle with me (and steal, though I couldn't work out if that was on purpose and it was sorted before she left the shop...), telling me that she was just a poor pensioner and I should be 'reasonable'. Well, I'm just a poor young person. The whole country's in a pickle and there isn't anything that I can do about it but offer a good service at the best price I can. And this is my best price. I do reserve the right to change it again though, depending on how it works out (it could even go down I suppose!).

So, there's my explanation of the price - now a bit of a rant about html...

Sooooo, websites, as far as I can work out are a bit like computers in that there are lots of files within files saved in public places with links between those files. So, the page here:

is a file somewhere, stored in the back of our website.

I'd already found the way to change the actual postage but I can't really do that without explaining upfront the prices can I? So this had to be changed first and the postage it last.

I couldn't find it anywhere!!!!!! It took most of yesterday just bloody finding the thing and in the end I had to ask on a forum and it was solved within minutes but now I can't find the forum to say thank you to whoever helped me.

Anyway - I found it and changed it. Boom. But then I noticed that the first paragraph needed changing because it said that we posted only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. That was based on Liese and Sue doing the postage rather than me but since Liese has moved away and Sue is too busy so that's fallen to me and June who can do it most days really.

So I wrote a nice paragraph explaining that in informal lovely language. Saved. Checked. Shit. There's a 'syntax error on line 17'. What on earth does that mean!?!?! I've still no idea but somehow it came to me that it was the bloody apostrophes! My website doesn't like apostrophes!!! WHAT ON EARTH!? Is that normal for websites?! I've seen apostrophes on websites before? So I took them all out which has left me with a somewhat awkward and formal sounding paragraph but it gets the point across so never mind.

Right, off to do some knitting now, after 1.5 hours of internetting I think I deserve it!

Love Eleanor. x