As sales of our language maps have increased over the last year, we've had to deal with the challenges of scaling distribution and making sure we can fill orders in a timely and efficient manner. Last year, we set up Fulfillment by Amazon in the UK, allowing us to use Amazon's warehousing and packing facilities to fulfill orders through our website. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time, allowing us to focus on developing new language courses and learning materials.
While Amazon FBA UK is great, it only allows us to fill orders received in Great Britain and continental Europe - it does not let us fill orders outside of that. This means, any orders from outside of Europe, such as from the USA or Canada, have had to be filled manually. Lots of trips to the post office!
I'm pleased to announce that we've now set up FBA within the USA, allowing us to fill orders from North America faster, more effectively, and cheaper than ever before. North American orders now qualify for local shipping prices and orders should arrive within a few days of purchase.
This is huge news for us. It's really important to us that our customers are satisfied, and it can be really frustrating sitting and waiting for weeks for an international order to arrive. Most of our orders of language maps to the USA have arrived within 5-10 business days, but a few have inexplicably taken much longer than that. If you're ordering a map as a gift, you want to receive it before a birthday or holiday, so having this new distribution in place will make things much better for our customers.
Additionally, this makes our lives significantly easier. We don't have to keep as much stock, nor do we have to manually pack, label, and ship each order we receive from North America. This in turn means more time spent on doing the important stuff - R&D for new online language learning programs and resources!