Shipping & Duty — How Delivery Actually Works
Every price on this site is a delivered price
Duty and clearance are inside the number you approve. There is no customs invoice after delivery, no release fee, no broker calling you for a payment before the courier hands over the parcel. Your accounts team books one figure.
Every lane we run is DDP and door to door: freight, export clearance, import clearance, import duty and the delivery to your address are all included. The EU's low-value consignment relief has been replaced by a flat €3 duty per item on low-value imports, charged per item rather than per parcel — which is one reason we group products into sets and bundles and pass the saving into the bundle price.
Our lanes, as they actually run
The windows below are what the forwarder gave us, not a rounded-down marketing figure.
| Lane | Where it goes | What it carries | Door to door |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK sea DDP — delivered by the forwarder's own truck | England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland | Long, heavy and bulky items that cannot sensibly fly | 45–60 days 40–45 days after sailing to customs clearance, then the truck is booked |
| EU sea DDP — one rate across the mainland | Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Czechia, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the rest of the EU | The same heavy and bulky catalogue, delivered to the door | 45–60 days pickup 40–45 days after sailing, then onward delivery |
| Air DDP — compact items | UK and EU | Light, compact items where the price per kilogram is high enough to carry the air rate | 7–14 days |
| Container — full or shared | UK and EU | Heavy or bulky goods bought in quantity, priced by volume rather than by weight | Quoted per shipment |
| Not shipped at all | — | Lithium-battery tools, pressurised and flammable goods. Buy cordless tools locally; from us, buy the hand tools. | — |
Every product page states which lane that item travels on and the window that follows from it. If you are outside the UK and the EU, ask us before ordering.
Why the heavy items are missing
Our lanes are billed per kilogram of chargeable weight — the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight. A 34 kg shelving rack packed for shipping bills at 34 kg, and at today's European sea rate that is more than half the shelf price before a cent of margin, duty or advertising.
So we apply one rule when we choose what to sell: freight has to stay inside 15% of the shelf price, with 10% as the working target. Anything that cannot get there is not listed at all. We could put a rack on the site at €300 and sell none, or at €139 and lose money on every order — neither is a business, so we do neither. The same rule is what decides the rest of the catalogue, and it is why the depth of this shop is deliberate rather than accidental.
These products come back when we can ship them by volume instead of by weight. We are pricing container terms now. Need shelving, racks or a trolley jack in quantity? Tell us the volume and we will cost it as a container rather than pretend it fits on a kilogram lane. The longer explanation is here.
Consolidation and trade orders
Trade customers ordering mixed quantities get one consolidated shipment wherever the items share a lane: one customs entry, one delivery, one invoice. Where a mixed order contains both air-lane and sea-lane items we ship in two consignments and tell you which arrives when, instead of holding everything back to the slower date.
Tracking and delivery
You receive a reference when the consignment actually leaves our warehouse, not when the label is printed. Air consignments carry parcel tracking. Sea consignments do not: what you get is the container and bill-of-lading reference when the container is loaded, and a delivery booking confirmation once clearance is complete. There is no scan-by-scan history while the goods are on the water, and if a competitor shows you one, ask what it is tracking.
Deliveries go to the address on the order. For trade orders we can deliver to a business address with a goods-in contact and, where the carrier supports it, a delivery window.
If something arrives damaged
Photograph the parcel before opening if the outer box is visibly crushed, then photograph the item. Report within 48 hours with the images and your order number. Damage in transit is our claim to make against the carrier, not something we ask you to negotiate — we replace or refund and pursue the courier ourselves.