UK Film Lab moving to Canada

[Christian Ward]

I'm trying to add CFL into the nifty price estimator, and sent a query to them via their web form about the cost of outbound postage (@Christian Ward ). At the moment it looks like C$23 for up to at least 10 films (didn't check how many more could go for that price) for the DHL option, which is (not surprisingly) pretty steep compared to UK-based alternatives. Process and scan prices are very competitive though, specially as their "small" scans are similar to most folks "medium" scans. When UKFL was included I showed them as not having a small scan; probably confusing when you went to the web site, but the best comparison I could see.

Hi Chris. For orders up to 10 rolls it makes more sense to use the film forwarding service. The costs of this are whatever it takes for the customer to get their film to our UK address, then we cover the 2-3 day shipping to us in Canada. We have indeed put the direct DHL shipping option on the website for those smaller order sizes just for anyone who doesn't want to use the film forwarding service (and one or two people have chosen to send their smaller orders through the direct service) but for the vast majority of cases we expect almost everyone will be using the film forwarding service for their orders up to 10 rolls. At the moment we ship out every Thursday for that service and it gets delivered to us here in Canada on a Monday. At present the uptake for the service has been excellent which is a great start, so if/when necessary we can look to ship out to us twice a week. As mentioned in the email, once order sizes go above 10 rolls the direct DHL option becomes much more cost effective. For example one of our regular customers in Germany sent us an order recently via our DHL service....it cost him less than it used to cost him when we were in the UK, and it was also quicker too!

 

[ChrisR]

Hi Chris. For orders up to 10 rolls it makes more sense to use the film forwarding service. The costs of this are whatever it takes for the customer to get their film to our UK address, then we cover the 2-3 day shipping to us in Canada. We have indeed put the direct DHL shipping option on the website for those smaller order sizes just for anyone who doesn't want to use the film forwarding service (and one or two people have chosen to send their smaller orders through the direct service) but for the vast majority of cases we expect almost everyone will be using the film forwarding service for their orders up to 10 rolls. At the moment we ship out every Thursday for that service and it gets delivered to us here in Canada on a Monday. At present the uptake for the service has been excellent which is a great start, so if/when necessary we can look to ship out to us twice a week. As mentioned in the email, once order sizes go above 10 rolls the direct DHL option becomes much more cost effective. For example one of our regular customers in Germany sent us an order recently via our DHL service....it cost him less than it used to cost him when we were in the UK, and it was also quicker too!

Thanks Christian... sorry I didn't read this before posting the new version of the nifty price estimator just now, which includes the £5.05 price that I discussed by email with Erica. Anyway, it's shown separately from the rest of the calculation, so folk can make up their own mind. It's a fiddle to update, so I'll probably change it next time there's a significant issue.