No one delivers free; they just add the cost to the item. Over half of our customers collect so doing that would mean that they would be paying for something they weren't receiving. Also it means that the more someone buys, the more they pay in extra costs for a delivery.

We set our prices so that even with delivery, the vast majority of customers pay less for our Furniture than from competitors.

We obviously don't know our customer's circumstances unless they tell us. We do ask customers to make sure that they are able to help the driver where access is limited and to book a 2-man delivery if they are not able to help.

More of our customers collect even heavy items than book a delivery so we know that most customers prefer to deal with their items themselves.

2-man delivery is to your room of choice. 1-man delivery is inside your front door only, assuming the access is all right or you help him lift the item(s) to the door. Our drivers work to a fixed timetable. If they take too long they are liable to cause other customers inconvenience or even fail to make that delivery.

The quick answers are that this is part of our Terms and Conditions and using a secure payment system we have little choice.

In most cases, because of the delays in the Banking System, customers receive their goods before we receive payment. Where goods are not yet available we will have paid the supplier before we receive money from the customer. This enables us to get a better price from the supplier which we pass on.

We believe that it is very important that our payment s system is secure. We use SagePay. They act as a processing centre between the banks for Internet payment. They process billions of pounds a year. It is only possible for us to take either full payment or no payment. Last year we tried a system by which we took no payment until the goods were available. This was expensive for us but we thought customers would like it. Much to our surprise they didn't " we received many more complaints about not taking the money than we had by taking it. The first reason was that the customer's banks reacted in different ways. Some froze the money negating any advantage, and some voided the transaction after a few days meaning that we had to ask the customer to pay again. Customers also told us that they liked to pay when they knew that they had the funds rather than later when they might not have.