Our Latest News: Welcome to our second (semi) regular newsletter since our move to Shannon last year.
Faster Shipping
Our goal at Book Express is to ensure all orders arrive with our customers as quickly as possible. We use NZ Post overnight shipping as our standard method for this reason. We strive to ensure all orders received up to midday are packed and shipped out that day with delivery to most places in New Zealand by the following day.
However this did not happen in the weeks leading up to Christmas last year. In some cases we took nearly a week to get orders out the door. This happened for a number of reasons – some good, some not so good. On the good side, we were absolutely swamped with orders leading up to Christmas, with many people electing to give second hand books as Christmas presents – in previous years we had seen almost no impact on volumes with Christmas present buying. On the not so good side, we experienced some computer issues which slowed down the processing of orders correctly, and we also had a staff shortage. We have now addressed all of these reasons, and ramped up capacity to cope with short term demand surges.
So if you were one of our customers who experienced a long delay in getting your order in December, please accept our apologies. We are now back to our goal of getting most orders out the door within 24 hours of receiving the order. Â MILITARYÂ
Lots and Lots of Military and Aviation books
We were lucky enough to recently acquire a large collection of military and aviation books. These books are generally in very nice condition, with many appearing to be unread.
The only small issue with them is the previous owner added a Dewey Decimal label to the spine of each book, and sometimes adding a small library notation to the copyright page. If you see a listing for one of our books mentioning a ‘library marking on the spine from a private collector’, this means it is one of those books. In many cases the label on the spine can be easily removed, returning the book to an As New condition.
We have added two new categories to our military listings, Tanks and Guns because there are so many books that fit into these categories. So if you are a collector of military books, please keep your eye on our New Arrivals, Second World War, Modern Wars, Aviation, Tanks and Guns collections – there will be plenty to choose from over the next few months.
Goodbye Banana Boxes, Hello Shelves
We have used banana boxes to store our books from the very beginning of Book Express. However we are now switching to industrial shelving to house our book inventory, a move which has been long overdue.
Why should you care? This change has a number of advantages for both us and our customers:
Goodbye Banana Boxes, Hello Shelves
We have used banana boxes to store our books from the very beginning of Book Express. However we are now switching to industrial shelving to house our book inventory, a move which has been long overdue.Â
 This change has a number of advantages for both us and our customers:
 * it will be easier and faster to find books for orders (see point one above). No more moving four boxes aside to get a book from the bottom box, and then heaving four boxes back in place again.
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 * it is easier to find missing books that have gone walkabouts from the right box (which seems to be happening too often lately). Having everything visible on a shelf makes it easier to look around for missing books and hopefully finding them.
 * it just looks nicer!
RIP banana boxes.
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Darryl and The Book Express Team
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