As an ethical business, we try to prioritise certain elements of postage: fair prices, recyclable yet protective materials, and appropriate delivery times.
Postage services
We send almost all of our parcels via Royal Mail 1st Class (or Royal Mail Standard International) and in our experience this is both swift and reliable.
Larger parcels will be sent via courier, usually Parcelforce or DPD or UPS.
Standard or tracked delivery
At checkout, you will have the option of choosing standard delivery (untracked) or a faster delivery (with tracking).
If you would like to receive a tracking number for your order, please make sure to choose the “tracked” postage method during checkout. This also seems to help the speed of delivery – tracked packages rarely seem to be delayed as much, especially when posting internationally.
If you place a larger order, we are sometimes able to upgrade your shipping from standard to tracked, without any extra charge. We cannot guarantee this, however, although we do try wherever possible.
Our dispatch time
Please allow two working days for us to package up your order and dispatch it to you.
Postage time
In our experience, this is how long packages normally spend in transit:
| Destination | Time |
|---|---|
| Within the UK | usually within 3 working days |
| Within Europe | usually within a week |
| Internationally | usually within a week and a half |
However, if it does not arrive on time, please do be patient, and give it a little more time just to be on the safe side before contacting us – a good estimate is that deliveries, if delayed, sometimes take twice as long as they should.
Unfortunately there is very little we can do about a delay after we have dispatched the package.
VAT and customs issues
We do not charge or collect VAT on any order. We are also not signed up to the EU VAT IOSS system.
If you are buying from outside the UK, then you may need to pay VAT or customs duty when importing your books.
We recommend, wherever possible, buying from a local reseller who stocks our titles. If you have a local HEMA distributor, and would like it to be easier to buy our books, please suggest to your local distributor to get in touch with us about stocking our books in your country.
Missed deliveries, and packages returned to us
Please make sure that you give us the correct address (capitalised properly, and any abbreviations expanded) and that there is a good chance that the delivery will be successful.
If you are not at home during the day, when the postman is likely to attempt delivery, might it be better to give us your work address so that the delivery is more likely to reach you successfully?
If the postal services return your package to us because they were unable to deliver it to you, then we will send you an email to let you know.
We cannot refund the price of postage if a delivery has been attempted but has failed; if you would like us to attempt another delivery, we will ask for the fee to cover the cost of another delivery attempt. If you do not respond to our email within a month, we will assume that you no longer want the package, and so we will refund you the price of your order minus the price paid for postage.