Are you on the UK mainland? No. Does the courier need to pay for a ferry to get over to you? Yes. Therefore couriers charge us more. The only one I can think of that doesn't charge more for the IoW is Royal Mail, but they charge us a lot more than other couriers for decent sized parcels going to mainland addresses, so no one would get free delivery if we used them and people would be moaning that the normal shipping cost is too high. The Royal Mail also caused a lot of problems in losing and damaging parcels when we used them before. We are limited by the couriers we can use, some will not carry oil and some offer a rubbish service, so we use Fed Ex and UK Mail for UK deliveries as they carry oil, offer a good service and are well priced for most areas. In about the last 4-5 years, all of the different couriers we have looked at using have charged extra for the IoW, but it used to only be a couple of quid extra, so we covered that. Now the charge is higher, we can't cover it. Couriers also seem to be extending the area they class as Scottish Highlands as that costs more to send to, I guess with the rising fuel costs it makes sense. We're also finding that some places are charging more for TR postcodes now, so that affects us here, even though we are UK mainland.
We are not rip off merchants, we just charge what things cost.
Cheers
Tim
