Healthelicious Pricing and Shipping Policy

I am endeavouring to make it as viable as possible for you to regularly consume my spectacular nutrition. To this end I have crafted a pricing model that allows you to purchase just a small quantity to start with, just like you would in a retail outlet, to try it out. Then, when you find out from personal experience exactly how good my products deliver on their promise, you can order in larger volumes and save a lot!

Or, to put it anoither way, you can obtain a top quality, hand crafted product at closer to the price of a mass produced product.

When you purchase a single cake from a bakery you pay $5 to $10 for it, maybe more. You get something that tastes nice but you don’t know what’s in it.

The cheapest option is if I make a whole batch, just for you. The unit price for that is the same as a distributor would pay.

Retail is my label for the price you would expect to pay for the product through a retail outlet.

When buying less than 20 bars/slices or less than 4 tubs of NutriBlast®, you pay Retail.

Carton is my label for the wholesale price a retailer would expect to pay from a distributor.

When buying between 20 and 119 bars/slices or between 4 and 15 tubs of NutriBlast®, you pay the Carton price.

Bulk is my label for the price a distributor would expect to pay from a manufacturer.

When buying 120 bars/slices or more or 16 or more tubs of NutriBlast®, you pay the Bulk price.

If you are interested, here is the history on how this came about.

If you’ve had a poke around my web site you may have noticed I am very transparent with my pricing. For each product I have listed my three price levels, Retail, Wholesale and Distributor.

1. The retail price is for small quantities (under 4 tubs of NutriBlast or under 20 bars/slices) that a retail customer would expect to pay in a shop. 2. The bulk or wholesale price, that which a retailer would pay from a distributor, is for 4-15 tubs of NutriBlast or 20-119 bars/slices. 3. The distributor price applies for 16 or more tubs of NutriBlast or 120 or more bars/slices.

That structure came about thus:

Shortly after I started Healthelicious, when I was packing my bars and slices in cello packaging, I sent some of my top bars to a distributor to health food shops.This was when my top bar had only 47 ingredients. This was his response:

Dear Tom

I apologise for the delay in coming back to you regarding your range of health bars. Unfortunately we have not received the required interest from our retail customers for the following reasons:

•Packaging and labeling needs to be of a much higher standard

•Price point too high for their customer base

•Shelf life too short for their requirements (they want in the order of 9-12 months)

I would like to add many customers did say that they were loaded with nutrients well above anything else they had seen.

I would like to thank you for your interest but unfortunately we would not be able to distribute your products at this point as we would not have enough support from our customers to do justice to your products.

(Just as an aside, since then I have improved the labels and purchased foil bags and vacuum seal the bars to give them a much longer shelf life.)

I considered this for a millisecond and thought to myself, “Thank you VERY much Uncle Tobys.” (The biggest muesli bar maker in Australia.) “You’ve even got health food shop owners believing that to be successful a product has to be as cheap as oats and sugar with a ton of preservative but in pretty packaging!”

So if my product was too expensive to gain traction in retail outlets I decided to look after the customers who supported me by allowing them to purchase from me at retail, wholesale or distributor price based on the quantity purchased and altered my web site accordingly.

For instance the retail price of my Greens Plus nutrition powder is $120, the carton/wholesale price is $75 and the distributor price is $60.

International Orders

Regarding shipment to other countries. On smaller orders to close overseas destinations, like our New Zealand neighbours, the extra postage cost is compensated for by me not having to pay our consumption tax - GST - on overseas purchases, so there is no extra charge. And even on a Trial Pack of bars and slices to the UK the extra shipping was only $12.

Shipping Costs

Re freight or shipping charges. I know some sites offer free freight. I also know many people object to paying shipping. My situation is this. Many people who live close to me call in to pick up product from me to save the shipping cost. This obviously saves my time packing their order and taking it to the post office.

Rather than have two pricing structures, one for shipped product with the shipping and handling costs built in, and one for collected product without those costs inbuilt, it is far simpler for me and I feel far fairer to both groups of my clients to have one pricing model and only charge shipping and handling when I ship product.

Please bear in mind that there is no way that the shipping cost I charge covers the postage AND the time it takes to pack and despatch an order.

Believe it or not, the very day after I created this page a new client emailed me:

“Tom, the postage and handling seems expensive I am assuming that your postage rate is Express post.
I purchase a lot on the internet and receive well over 1.5 kg of product for no more than $14. Just saying.
Every success with your business.
regards,
L”

I replied:

“G’day L,

Thanks for your order and I really appreciate you raising the postage concern with me. It gives me the opportunity to address it rather than just have you sit there stewing on it, thinking I am a profiteering rogue.

I have many of my customers call in and pick up their orders from me. I do not have a different rate for them. I have the same rate I charge for pickups and delivered items. That’s why I charge postage and handling for delivering, because shipping and handling is not costed into the price of the product.

I don’t ordinarily use Express Post.

I think the ordinary parcel post postage on your minerals and two bottles will be $7.95.

If it takes me 10 minutes to pick it, pack it, address it, stamp it and log it and 10 minutes to get to and from the Post office, that’s 20 minutes of time I have to cost into the shipping and handling fee charged.

I was told by a girl who helps me out at the expos I attend that the minimum pay rate is now $28.05 an hour. Adding all other costs on top of that (workers comp, holiday pay, public holidays, sick days etc.) is about 30%. A business needs to charge out at least double if not 5 times the rate it pays its staff to cover rent, electricity etc. etc. etc.

But for this exercise let’s say I am a philanthropist and don’t need to make a profit, just cover costs. If I factor my costs at $36.46 an hour ($28.05 x 1.3), then twenty minutes of time costs $12.15. That plus the $7.95 postage and the cost of the box! Add another 50 cents and the total is $20.60. So minimally I am subsidising a posted article by sixty cents rather than making a huge profit on it. To more properly cover the employee charge out rate solely with the shipping and handling charge that fee should more appropriately be $40.

So anything over a kilo, where the postage rate is more like $14 to Eastern states, let alone WA, I am going backwards at the rate of $6 an order, even charging $20 for shipping and handling.

I honestly don’t know the pricing models of other companies and how they work it. I don’t believe it is that nobody but me knows how to cost things accurately. It must be that their shipping and handling cost is part covered in their product pricing and only part covered by what they charge the customer for shipping and handling. Probably for Public Relations reasons. Which means customers who collect are subsiding delivered to customers. Which I think is unfair. It is obviously more palatable to mail order customers, but it is nevertheless inequitable.

Hope this helps explain it.

Cheers.”