Our Supply Chain
The majority of our sales are fulfilled by drop-shipping directly from a number of UK based distributors (some part of larger groups which also operate in other European countries).
These distributors hold some stock within the UK, other stock is held within the European supply chain, and other items are back-ordered on demand from outside Europe.
Each morning, for every product on our site, we compare the price and stock levels from all our distributors. The price and availability on our website is then updated to reflect the best price we can source on that day (with a preference to in-stock items over back-ordered, so we can ship immediately where possible, even if it means sourcing from a distributor with a higher price).
Note that little of the stock is manufactured within Europe, but much of it passes through on its way into the UK.
After Brexit
We do not expect distributors (or local resellers) to greatly alter their logistics and hold more stock within the UK – it would probably not be financially sustainable.
However we do not anticipate the supply of goods and spares stopping in any way.
So the risks are:
- Increased delays passing through customs, so orders not carried as stock within the UK will ultimately take longer to reach the end customer.
- Upstream price changes (presumably increases), which our systems will automatically reflect in our sales prices.
Our Customer Base
We have suspended trading with the EU, Irish Republic and Northern Ireland for the present.
We regret this. It is due to the form-filling introduced by the British government from January 2021.
We never found it easy to trade with companies in the rest of the EU. The couriers tend to charge a lot whenever a parcel crosses a border. Currency differences mean delays and substantial payments to banks for changing Euro’s into pounds. Business practices in France differ disconcertingly. And whilst we understand the urge to compile statistics, having to look up customs codes for a diverse mish-mash of thousands of spares is too time consuming.
In the last year our total volume of trade with Ireland was twenty orders, totalling less than £1000.
As it is, where things go to the Republic we have to fill in an EU sales list form. This is an extra manual step that takes a skilled person ten or twenty minutes. But it’s better than a day or two spent trying to find how to poke data into some HMRC “portal” (which is what was necessary with VAT).
The British government has several leaflets (available to those that register with the Trader Support Service) insisting that it is easy to keep trading, but none succinctly explains what needs to be done. Presumably this is because on 7th December with less than 3 weeks to go they don’t actually know themselves. Everything seems to point to a 2-hour long video. None of us wants to waste time watching a 2 hour video that probably won’t actually give the answer.
Our understanding is that the government intends to consolidate this in one “portal”.
The government should explain things in writing. Then we can read and file the information against the inevitable event when it all goes wrong.
We don’t want you to pay for goods which are then stuck in customs because they misled us with a video.
We would like to ship goods worldwide as Amazon does, they are the ultimate competition for everyone online.
Obviously Amazon can delegate someone to watch the video. Presumably they will have teams in London, Dublin and Belfast to deal with issues and they might all watch the video in a training session. Quite likely, someone from Customs and Excise will be willing to attend their training session. They probably have liaison desks in Amazon HQ at Holborn Viaduct and an Amazon liaison desk in HMRC.
Ultimately we will be looking at changing the code that runs our site to join things with whatever portal HMRC actually has. For now we have other priorities.
