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Keith Morrigan on Friday, 11 April, 2014 at 20:13:23 (modified: 29 April, 2014 at 12:52:10)
We are just rolling out some major new facilities for our website, so that for the first time you can now design, cost, order and pay for your custom mosaic online, all in one seamless process. Making this possible has involved the introduction of several new features to turn our mosaic design site into a full blown shop in addition to our advanced mosaic design tools. New Features: - Shopping Basket
We have added a Shopping Basket (similar to that on many shop sites, including our own) with facilities to add and remove products as well as to change the product quantity. - Other Currency Display
In your Shopping Basket, once you have selected your country you will, for most major currencies, be shown secondary prices in your currency. These will be prefixed with "≈" (approximately) or "About", as they show an estimate of the likely cost to you based on current exchange rates. They are based on daily published reference rates by the European Central Bank, with a marginal wholesale market spread and a typical 2.5% currency exchange charge (by PayPal, your bank or your card issuer). - UK & International Pricing
We can now automatically adjust shopping basket prices for your location including the actual delivery cost. To achieve this, we have linked up with the systems of Parcel2Go.com as independent brokers to provide live courier quotes. These are combined and compared with some Royal Mail postal prices (where possible) to select an optimal delivery cost and update your basket pricing. - Delivery Options
As well as the auto-selected optimal delivery, you may be shown a selection of other delivery services and costs, allowing you to choose faster/slower deliveries, or select a preferred courier. UK delivery options may also include Saturday or timed next day deliveries: most mosaics are 'Made to Order' with a delayed dispatch so these are only relevant for coordinating when deliveries can be accepted. - Order Placement and Payment
In your Shopping Basket, after choosing your delivery options the process becomes fairly conventional: you can select your payment method, add a order/delivery comment and proceed to checkout (needs account). As with a typical shop, you can view and check your order details on the order confirmation page: with one click you can then place your order, and if PayPal selected, proceed to their site for payment, finally ending with an order success page/email. - Collections and Quotes
Some countries are not covered by standard courier services, and some of our mosaics are too large/heavy for standard international or UK services: where a live quote is not available we provide a fallback Collect price excluding delivery. With a little effort you may be able to organise collection yourself (by arrangement): there are such a wide variety of specialist couriers, logistics and freight forwarding services! When this lower Collect price is shown, we also provide the ability to ask for a quote for your basket - we may still be able to find a suitable delivery service manually. We have also kept the quote facility for individual products in case you have any queries, issues or uncertainties, or just prefer a more personal approach
Our existing UK mosaic shop Kaamar.co.uk will be retained but slightly refocused as a simple conventional shop for straight forward purchases by UK customers and will continue to list our gallery mosaics. Update 29th April 2014A few more features have now been activated to enhance the site shopping experience. New Features: - Stock Availability
We do carry limited stock of some products, allowing for faster delivery: the mosaic product detail and other pages have been updated to clearly show product availability including when any stock is available for order and how many. The stock control system is fully integrated with our UK shop Kaamar.co.uk so this information can be kept current and accurate. - Special Offers
We keep a variable selection of mosaic designs on special offer at a reduced price on our UK shop Kaamar.co.uk so you can benefit from even better value. Not only have we now integrated those special offers with this site, showing those reduced prices on gallery and product pages, but have also further expanded the savings shown to include customised versions of the same mosaics!
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