Special Delivery 'v' Recorded Delivery

With the current Royal Mail Strike we're getting more enquiries than usual about the differences between recorded delivery and special delivery. Firstly I'll cover it from Royal Mails' point of view. Recorded delivery items are treated in exactly the same way as normal mail, except that upon delivery the postman gets a signature from the recipient, or if no ones available to sign for it, it's returned to the local delivery office for collection or re-delivery. Special delivery on the other hand is tracked right through the delivery system by means of a bar code which is scanned through out the journey from dispatch to delivery. The special delivery service we use also guarantees delivery the next working day after posting. There are of coarse several other differences in the services, such as compensation levels and what types of things can be carried.
At our end we treat both order types slightly different. The special delivery items have to be brought individually to the post office, where as recorded items are collected in bulk by Royal Mail. This obviously makes the special delivery service much more time consuming which is why it's more expensive than standard recorded delivery.
We do our best to dispatch special delivery items within 24 hours of receiving the order but we can't guarantee this, so it's best to give us a call and check when we can get your order to you. If the order is urgent we can usually make time to get it packed and posted.

Postal Strike Continues

The Royal Mail postal strike which has been ongoing for the past few weeks is continuing. We're noticing some small delays in orders but nothing too serious, and we're working hard to get orders posted quickly and following Royal Mail's guidelines on when is best to post. The situation is a little further confused by the fact that postal workers in Northern Ireland are striking on different days which means we can sometimes get orders collected here when they wouldn't be in the rest of the UK, and obviously the down side is that some days when work is going on as normal in the rest of the UK, we've no collections here. We have been actively updating the Royal Mail Strike page and will keep doing so until the situations resolved.
We are doing everything possible to minimize disruption and do hope it doesn't cause to much inconvenience.

Hen Night

We've added a few new hen night products to both the Hen Night Shop and the hen night section of Bridal Gems. The new range includes:

• Single Use Cameras
• Name Badges
• Dare Cards
• Pink Feather Boas
• "L" Plate Boppers

The new range is exceptionally high quality and very competitively priced.

Bank Transfer Payment

We've decide to stop accepting BACS bank transfer payments through the website. This wasn't all that difficult a decision because since we started to accept online credit/debit card payments virtually no one used the facility and to be honest we found it only cluttered up and confused the checkout page. We can of coarse still accept BACS transfers and if anyone still wants to pay be this method they should contact us.
Just on the payment side of things we've made a small change the the checkout page and added debit cards to the list of accepted payments, we did always accept debit cards but for some reason they were not listed separate from credit cards which just occasionally caused confusion. The payment option is now credit/debit card.

Continued Royal Mail Strike Action

Royal mail workers are to continue their strike action on Thursday 12th and Friday 13th of July. Customers can expect some delays to orders over this period. The main problems will be for customers expecting to receive orders on Friday. Any orders placed over or just before the strike period will be packed as normal but we won't be able to dispatch them until after the strike.
Again we'd like to offer our apologies for the inconvenience caused and hope it doesn't upset your plans to much.
For more information visit our Royal Mail Strike page.

Returns Policy Change

We've made a few minor changes to our returns policy, we've changed the return address and made the actual wording of the policy a little clearer. The basic principles of the returns policy are pretty much unchanged. The main reason for the change is the security issues involved in addressing packages to "Bridal Gems". Some time ago we realised having "Bridal Gems" written on the packages we send out, greatly increased the chances of the package going missing in the post, so we dropped all reference to it and the rate of loss fell. The new return address simply puts "Amanda Carson" in place of "Bridal Gems" which will hopefully help protect our customers returns.
The full Postage and Returns policy can be found here: Bridal Gems Returns Policy