As the recipient of the DDP experiment (US delivery), I thought I’d let everyone know how it went. The item shipped out from Birmingham, UK, at 16:04 GMT on Wednesday and showed up at my door with no action on my part Friday at 14:30 PDT. This delivery seems as good as it could possibly get and seems better than most any delivery I could have received from a US local supplier. Total door-to-door transit time was about 54 hours to the US West Coast. Hats off to Londinium Espresso
Mark.
The collar and lid is stainless steel. The collar fits every model in the Compak essential on demand range of grinders; E5-6-8-10
A number of you asked me to post when we reached this point, so here it is
Have a pleasant Easter
Next week is shaping up to be a big one already
There are several functional reasons why we have decided to disable the guest checkout:
1) Customers who purchase a machine with an account are automatically given access to the owners' only area of the support form, which is an important post sale support channel
2) Purchases made with an account have an order history
3) It enables us to process orders for customers purchasing with a VAT ID more easily
We were spending an inordinate amount of time manually adding owner access privileges to accounts the moment the machine arrived with the customer as they were unable to access the most recent version of the LR instruction manual, which is held as a PDF in the permanent file
This access is automatically assigned if an account is created at the time of purchasing the machine
Almost all purchasers of machines who checked out as a guest would create an account within 24 hours of purchase and then need owner privileges manually added to their account
We apologise for any inconvenience this causes but our over riding objective is to improve your customer experience
The periennial problem with single dosing is pop corning, that is to say because there is no weight pushing down on the beans that are being ground they are able to bounce away from the cutting face which results in an irregluar grind, which in turn produces a poor extraction
Much resource has been expended on investigating possible solutions but the only one i know of is large diameter flat burrs
In the image above is 19.4g of beans tipped into my Compak R120; see how the entire dose is effectively lying between the upper and lower burr?
When we switch on the grinder almost immediately the entire dose is thrown sideways into the cavernous space that 120mm burrs give you, and the tiny amount of popcorning that occurs for a second or so at startup in no way affects the grind because the beans at the cutting face are so far away from the open space at the spindle with so many beans between them also being thrown outwards with centrifugal force that the beans at the cutting face are unable to bounce and therefore a poor grind does not result
It is true of course that the larger the diameter of the burrs the more any inaccuracies in machining tolerances and alignment are magnified, but this is purely a quality control issue as opposed to a shortcoming of design
I simply do not see how burrs of a conventional diameter can avoid the popcorning that occurs with single dosing, and for this reason i see the forthcoming Kafatek MAX as setting a new standard in single dosing grinders for the home and my name is most certainly on the waiting list
Dont buy anything in high volumes to chase lower unit costs; that is a game for established businesses
A good example is packaging and branded items. Speaking for myself at least i find it incredibly tempting to order 1000 units of something to get the unit price down
But it is a mistake and a lesson ive had to learn more than once
When you are starting up there is one thing you want above all else; flexibility
Often you will not know in advance what is going to fly and what is going to flop, and speaking for myself i often wake up with a completely new idea and i want to implement it immediately; if youve got 2 years of stock of the item you want to change this really puts a damper on things
Sure, the unit cost is higher when you order low volumes but the total outlay is less and cash conservation is the name of the game as a start-up, at least if its your money on the table
If it doent work as well as you hoped you flog it off or put it in the bin and change tack
If youve bought a container load of widgets with an unbelievably low unit cost and they are non conforming or not well received by the market or you just want to take your business in a different direction you have a bit of a problem
Pilot studies rule. Yes they have a cost, but it is the least expensive way to learn
Experiment every day, but never go all in until you've proven it works.
I would recommend skipping those and getting a Londinium R. Had there been such a thing at the time, and if I had experienced it, in all honesty I probably would not have or need a Slayer now. Get the 220V version if possible in your home. Spend the extra money on a good grinder and beans.
DDP means 'delivered duty paid', in other words you as the customer do not need to pay DHL a penny - the tax and duty charges are billed back to our DHL account and the goods should arrive with you sooner
this week i have asked a customer in the US if he would be willing to be the guinea pig, and he has agreed
so when his machine is ready, weds i expect, i will book it out using DHL's DDP service and then we will sit back and see what happens
my hope is that we can improve the customer experience in that you can sit back and wait for DHL to ring your doorbell and offer you one big box from LONDINIUM
if it works well it is an optional service i would like to add to our offering, as the tax & duty charge for the USA is very modest but our customers are generally time poor and would value the opportunity to avoid sitting on the telephone waiting to speak to someone at DHL
lets see how it goes, we'll report back as soon as we've got something to say about how this experiment went
reiss.
All the goods on this website are priced in GBP (Great British Pounds), if for no other reason than we are an English registered company, the machines are made in England, and therefore our costs are also in GBP
However our customer base is very geographically diverse so we also offer the option for you to change the displayed currency on our website to another currency that is more meaningful to you
We also allow you to purchase the goods in these alternative currencies and these prices update fairly regualrly when the european currency markets are open
However, ultimately we still need to convert these various currencies in our various Paypal currency accounts into GBP and at this point it costs us to translated the funds into GBP
Accordingly there is a 3% premium on the non GBP prices on our website to cover this translation cost, and the FX risk itself which we would rather avoid
You can avoid this 3% premium by paying us using TransferWise, a genius of an idea that was only brought to our attention when a guy in Germany decided to pay us using TransferWise
The genius of TransferWise is the funds do not actually cross borders - TransferWise are simply booking internal accounting journal entries, recording a debit in their (for example) USD account that you direct your funds to in the USA as a normal domestic payment, and a corresponding credit in their GBP bank account in England that they pay out funds from to our GBP account in England
It takes about 4 days for them to approve your account, but once approved it is a super fast and efficient method of making foreign exchange payments that you then have for all your future foreign currency payments
There's nothing in it for us, we're just spreading the word as we're tired of the steep FX charges from traditional banks and also they are extremely slow, the funds taking several days to arrive
TransferWise: a path to a less expensive LONDINIUM
