Monday, September 18, 2006

Keeping Prices Low

Last week, I wrote an article about the price of copper. Given the big increases in the cost of copper over the past year, we have done our best to keep the prices of our copper products as low as possible.

How do we do this?

It's important to note that we do not compromise the quality of the copper we use. We use the same grades of copper today as we did before the prices rose so dramatically. Instead, we have been striving to keep costs low in other ways.

Internet only. All of our business is conducted over the internet only. This means we do not have the costs of a showroom, parking lot, sales staff, company brochures or mail order catalogues. We work at maintaining a good presence in internet search engines by managining our website content rather than paying for expensive advertising & much of our business comes word-of-mouth from happy customers recommending us to their friends and family.

No frills packaging. While it's very nice to receive a product in fancy packaging and boxes, we realize that you're not buying a beautiful pot rack or fence post cap for the box it comes in! As some of our items are an unusual shape, having boxes made & printed for these items would drive up costs, so instead we use simple packing & boxes that get the items to you safely.

Paperless invoicing. As much as possible, we conduct business by phone or by email. All customers that provide an email address should receive a detailed receipt by email within just a few minutes. This serves as your invoice, reciept and packing information. If you need a paper record, it can printed off from the email. Should there be any delays or you do not receive an email, we will of course be happy to send a paper copy if you let us know.

No 1-800 number. As much as we'd love to provide our customers with an 800 phone number to call us, our phone bill would increase 20-fold at least!

Relocation. Our recent relocation has enabled us to double our production space as well as office and store room space but for the same costs. This means that we can buy copper in bigger bulk & produce more products and so making it more cost effective.

Over the past year, we have had no choice but to increase some prices as copper became more expensive, but we do feel that the 7-10% increases are very low compared with the 70% increase in the overall cost of copper.




Click to read our previous article price of copper

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