UK Shipping
For shipping outside the UK visit International Shipping
UK orders placed by 1pm, Monday - Friday are usually dispatched on the same working day
If any item ordered is out of stock we will notify you by email as soon as possible to notify you of an estimated re-stocking date before proceeding with your order.
Our normal working days are Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays in England and our annual office closure over the Christmas and New Year period. For insurance purposes, all orders require a signature on receipt. Please note that we cannot deliver to PO Box addresses.
UK Mainland Shipping Services
A signature is required on recipt for all shipping services for insurance purposes.
- UK Standard with Parcelforce - est. 2 working days from dispatch - £8.00
- UK Next Working Day with Parcelforce - £10.00
- XL Parcel - more than 1m wide - Standard (est. 2 working days) - £20.00
- Saturday Delviery by Parcelforce - £20.00
- Collars & Leads - Royal Mail - dispatched by Holly&Lil and Petiquette on behalf of Charley Chau - £5.00
UK Remote Area Delivery Zones - Highlands & Islands, Northern Ireland and Channel Islands
Unfortunately there are instances where courier companies charge an additional fee for deliveries to UK addresses in areas that they classify as remote, such as the UK Highlands & Islands, the Channel Islands and Northern Ireland. We will advise you by email and send an electronic invoice for the additional shipping fee before dispatching your order if there is a shipping surcharge to pay.
Click & Collect from Charley Chau HQ
If you would like to collect your order in person from our HQ in Manchester the service is free (no shipping charges) and your order will be available for collection within 24 hours on the next working day (11.00am - 5.00pm, Monday - Friday, closed on public holidays in England).
Our address for collections is: Unit F, The Courts, Kestrel Road, Manchester, M17 1SF. UK (View location map >)
If you have any questions about delivery times and shipping services please don't hesitate to contact us on hello@charleychau.com.
A note about our shipping charges ...
We're often asked why we don't offer "free" shipping. The straightforward answer is because there is genuinely no such thing as free shipping. To explain...
When we set up Charley Chau in 2010 we had no experience of retail and online retail we were very green behind the ears. One of the many things we didn't know back then was that most online retailers price shipping into their product prices so that they don't have to charge customers a separate shipping fee, and that enables them to say that they are offering "free" shipping. But it's not free - the cost of the shipping is already built into the product price and the customer is paying for it.
Traditional retailers that have physical stores and also sell online are in a position to offer "free" shipping online because their products are priced for high-street retail through physical shops which usually have higher overhead costs than online retail. When they sell an item online, their costs are lower than when selling in a physical high street store so they can offer "free" shipping to their online customers because their high-street pricing structure with much higher profit margins already built-in makes it possible.
We had no clue about any of this when we founded Charley Chau. Subsequently we have chosen not to add shipping into the price of our individual products because we feel that the right thing to do is to be 100% transparent with our customers on what they are paying for, even though we miss out on the very effective "free shipping" marketing tool that many online retailers take advantage of.
When shipping is built into a product price, customers often end up paying more than they need to. For example if we built shipping into our product prices and a customer ordered two items from our store, they would end up paying more than the cost to ship the parcel. We'd actually make a profit on shipping (which many online retailers do as common practice) but we don't think it's fair.
In 2022, our bill for courier services and packaging to ship our customers' orders came to over £80,000. We are a tiny business and that is an enormous bill - one that it's just not possible for us to absorb. There really is no such thing as free shipping even though we would love it to be the case.
We have two choices:
(i) Re-price our product range and build shipping into the product prices themselves, e.g. a Medium Double Fleece Blanket would be priced at £53.00 instead of £45.00, and then we could offer "free" shipping and stop charging a separate shipping fee on our customers' orders;
(ii) carry on as we are whereby customers can see clearly what they are paying Charley Chau products and what they are paying for shipping.
We've chosen to stick with the latter so that we're 100% transparent with our customers and our customers know exactly what they're paying for.