Delivery charge ‘rip off’

ISLANDERS are being asked to report high delivery charges to the local Citizen Advice Bureau after a new report showed they were being “routinely ripped off” by mail order firms.

Scotland’s islands pay a 508 per cent surcharge on deliveries compared to the rest of the country, according to the CAB Scotland report ‘Postcode Penalties’.

The average cost of delivering a parcel to the northern or western isles is £18.60.

The CAB report was started by the organisation’s Skye office where people decided to do something about the high charges being paid by islanders.

Citizen Advice Scotland head of policy Susan McPhee said they had been overwhelmed by more than 2,000 responses within a few weeks “with extraordinary stories of overcharging, late delivery, poor customer service and in some cases a refusal to deliver to their area at all”.

The worst offenders are eBay, Amazon Marketplace and Tesco, while the best are Amazon (not the marketplace), John Lewis and Marks & Spencer.

CAS have passed details to local trading standards teams who have approached eBay and others to change their delivery policies, with some success.

One Shetland customer told the survey they paid £25 for a CD that took two weeks to deliver from London and £5 for a CD that took five days to make it from California.

Shetland CAB manager Sylvia Jamieson invited local people to share their experiences over the Christmas season with her office or the trading standards team to help add to the picture and increase pressure for change.

Northern isles MP Alistair Carmichael said the survey showed there was a strong case for the Office of Fair Trading to look into the way the courier market operates.

“We have seen many cases locally where the cost of getting goods delivered is greater than the value of the product itself,” he said.

“These are often not even large or bulky purchases that might be expected to carry a higher cost. This is a manifestly ridiculous state of affairs.

“The government has acted to protect the universal postal service and the Royal Mail will deliver most parcels anywhere in the UK at a uniform price.

“The companies imposing these punitive charges need to look again at their delivery policy and give their customers in the northern isles a fair deal.”

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