From now on, you will start to see the following phrase appear against certain products on the Snorestore website:

“Please note:  this product may be supplied flat-packed to save you additional shipping costs.”

This means that we will more than likely* unbox your earplugs, still keeping them in their hygienic packaging, and send them to you together with their original box (flattened) and/or their instructions. This enables us to use an envelope which is classed as a large letter rather than a packet. It means you won’t have to pay the new £2.70 first class small packet rate for one of these items after 30th April. Most people will be paying pretty much what they are paying now and some lucky people will be paying a little less.

For some products this simply isn’t possible and there will be additional postage charges for these from April 30th. Rest assured we will not be seeking to profit from these increases at your expense. We’ve always had a policy of charging fair rates for shipping, and that’s not going to change. We will also continue to offer Second Class where we can, for those of you who aren’t in a hurry and who have an eye for a postage bargain.

We’re sorry we can’t absorb the price rises, however much we would like to and however much you would like us to. But it would be business suicide.

* if you are ordering more than one product, we might be able to leave these products in their original boxes. This is something we can only decide when it comes to packing up your order.

Snorestore of course isn’t immune to these price rises and while we have always been careful to charge as little as possible for postage and packing, we can’t absorb the new tariffs completely.  Packets in particular will cost considerably more than they do now – at least £2.70 – and packets make up the majority of our orders.

However, we have a solution in hand, which means that postage costs for some items* will cost you just the same as they do now – but only if you agree to receive your products in a slightly different format.

For example, one of our most popular products is SafeSound Original Earplugs – the 10-pair pack in particular. Currently, we charge you £1.25 in postage for this product (it costs us more than that but that’s what you pay). Under the new Royal Mail tariffs, you would have to pay £2.70 – more than twice as much. Clearly we can’t expect you to pay this on top of the product price of just £6.99.

So what we propose to do, is to unbox the earplugs, keeping them in their sealed pouch, and flatten the box. Placed side by side in a padded envelope, this product can then be classed as as a large letter size rather than a packet, which means the postage cost is massively reduced. As a result, you won’t be paying any more for postage for this item after April 30th than you do now.

"deconstructed packaging"

The downside of this is obviously that cosmetically, it doesn’t look very tidy when you open the envelope, as you can see in this picture >>

The upside: the cost of postage and packing doesn’t have to go up. Given that Royal Mail manages to squash quite a lot of the stuff we send out, we don’t know why we haven’t done this before. We will be explaining on each product page where this can be done, that this is how the product will arrive.

*other products where we propose to deconstruct the packaging include:

Mack’s SafeSound Ultra Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s SafeSound SlimFit Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s DreamGirl Earplugs (10 pairs)
Mack’s PillowSoft Earplugs (2 pairs)

and others to be confirmed.

Please let us know via the comments box or by email what you think of this plan.

The way it works is this: you place an order, and about a week later, you get an automatically-generated email from Trustpilot asking you to review your experience with Snorestore. Trustpilot doesn’t hang onto your personal information, and you won’t be spammed. The system is set up so that only verified customers can place reviews – we feel this is the fairest way as it means only people who have genuine experience of what we do here at Snorestore can express their opinions. It also stops dishonest people who might have a different reason entirely for posting a negative review, from getting access to the review system.

Snorestore staff can’t alter reviews – what you write will be seen on the Trustpilot site almost as soon as you hit Send. We can comment, and we do this occasionally, but mostly, we feel that what our customers write about us is more important than anything we could say.

It’s more the service you receive from Snorestore which is important to Trustpilot, so if you want to review a particular product, feel free to add your comments on the individual Snorestore product pages as before.

So, how are we doing? Erm. Pretty well it would seem. Which is not to say we’re resting on our laurels. We can always do better. Click on the badge below to see what real people are saying about us right now.

1) Second Class post is now no longer an option as the deadline for posting Second Class Royal Mail items was Saturday 17th December

2) First Class and First Class recorded orders must be placed by 2pm on Tuesday 20th December

3) Next Working Day (Special Delivery) orders must be placed by 2pm on Thursday 22nd December

4) If you’re taking things down to the wire, then if you use the Saturday delivery option and we receive your order by 2pm on Friday 22nd December, then your item(s) will arrive on Saturday 23rd.

5) Airmail: it’s too late now to guarantee that any items sent to Europe or beyond will arrive by Christmas. Sorry. You can still order of course, just please don’t expect your stuff to be with you by 25th December.

6) Er that’s it.

Snorestore will be dispatching every day before Christmas up to and including Friday 23rd December. After Christmas, we will not be able to send anything until Wednesday 28th December as the two preceding days are Bank Holidays in England.

Anyway, here are the last posting dates as published by Royal Mail:

UK
Sat 17th December: Second Class and Second Class Recorded Signed For™
Tue 20th December: First Class and First Class Recorded Signed For™
Thu 22nd December: Special Delivery™
Fri 23rd December: Special Delivery™ with Saturday Guarantee

Airmail
Mon 5th December: South & Central America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Far East (including Japan), Australia and New Zealand
Fri 9th December: Eastern Europe, USA and Canada
Mon 12th December: Western Europe

British Forces Post Office (BFPO)
Fri 2nd December: Airmail to Operational BFPOs
Thu 15th December: Airmail to Static BFPOs

Yes, it was basic, and yes it was hand-built using a teach-yourself  HTML book. But yes, it did the trick. We started getting orders straight away, even though we could only accept cheques to start with. It wasn’t until December 2001 that we were able to take payments online.

Anyway that’s all by the by, what we really want to talk about, is what Snorestore is like now, ten years on from those cringe-tastic early days.

For reason which are a bit obvious, we didn’t mark Snorestore’s ten year anniversary publicly in September. There was other more important stuff going on.

Instead, we got together with Lee Hackett, one of the best web designers in the business and between us came up with a brand spanking new sharp-as-a-button design which is so fit for purpose it aches with cool and useability:

All the earplugs you know and love are still there, but we reckon we’ve made it easier to find them. There’s less duplication and the pages are clean and bright and – we hope – enticing.

We had what we call a soft launch last weekend. We didn’t go mad telling the world that Snorestore has changed because, well, what if we’d got it horrendously wrong?

We did send out a discount code to our newsletter subscribers though. And so far, the reaction to our new shopfront has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, we haven’t had a single negative comment. We’re thrilled.

Anyway, here’s to the next ten years. And thanks for the last ten. It’s been great. Cheers.

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Feedback
Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 09:29:21 -0000
From: abc@ukabc.co
To: Snorestore

I can only echo the other endorsements on your web site. Spectacular service – ordered at lunchtime, delivered following day – suggest you should take over the running of Royal Mail!!  Thank you.

= = =

Followed by:

——– Original Message ——–
Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 10:53:52 +0000 (GMT)
From: xyz@xyz.co
To: Snorestore

Order Number: SNO123456
Order Date: 2 November 2011 14:47 GMT
Shipping: First Class
As the postage for my order is First Class I would expect to have been emailed
to advise that my order has been despatched

Would you please advise me when you intend to despatch If you cannot do this please
arrange cancellation so that I can order elsewhere

= = =

Now, which of those two emails would *you* prefer to receive?

“Well, you certainly know how to lose customers! I am an expat so I must be dishonest! You remind me why I never want to live in the UK again.”

We thought about replying:

“Dear Ms Dog-Barker,

We feel we should advise you that your email address may have been hacked, as it is being used to send emails which are a bit rubbish.

Yours, with increasing respect,

Glyn Jones (rtd.) “

But we didn’t. Because we are RESPONSIBLE and HONEST and we LOVE our CUSTOMERS.

Dear 1and1

It would be lovely if you’d apologise to everyone, including Snorestore’s customers, for the two-hour breakdown which took hundreds of thousands of websites offline today.

But I guess that’s too much to ask from a big company? You could learn some good lessons from us.

Best,

Snorestore

Tweet

Every now and then, a product comes onto the market and you go, “now why didn’t someone think of that before?” Well that just happened to us here at Snorestore.

We’d heard from customers over the years who had adapted their reusable earplugs to incorporate a headphone lead – but we’d never found a supplier who was prepared to do this commercially.

But that’s all changed now, with the advent of Plugfones. We’re the first company in the UK to stock their superb reusable headphone / earphones and we’re sure they will prove to be extremely popular. They work like earplugs, in that they stop outside noise getting in, but they incorporate an audio lead so you can listen to music without being interrupted by annoying external noise.

Plugfones are particularly useful for commuters (who hasn’t got hacked off on a packed bus or train by other people’s conversations or loud music?), factory workers and tedious but noisy DIY. Reusable and washable, and just £12.99, Plugfones could be the best piece of audio kit you buy this year.