A Few Tiny Announcements!

A Few Tiny Announcements!


It’s just a quick blog post from me this month, as I have a few announcements I want to share with you!

Firstly, as some of you might already have discovered, we have recently changed the way that we ship parcels. We will still be using Royal Mail, but we will now be using a tracked service instead of ordinary First Class post. You know when you order something online and then you get one of those fancy text messages or emails that says, “Your parcel from Tropic is going to be delivered today,” and gives options about how to track it and what to do if you’re not in? Well, now you should get something similar when you order from us!

I must confess that I don’t know at exactly which point you get the text message and/or email, so I apologise if it comes as soon as we print and pack your order, which we sometimes do at rather strange times of day! And I don’t know exactly what it says either, although I would like to know. If you read this post within a few days of upload and you feel like forwarding me the Royal Mail text or email, I’d be interested to see it! Anyway, we’re hoping that the new service will be better for you, because you’ll be able to track your orders more easily and it should result in fewer of those ‘sorry we missed you’ cards.

If you’re an overseas customer, your order will still be sent using Royal Mail Tracked and Signed, but you too should get an email that allows you to track your order more easily than before.

The second announcement is that we will hopefully soon be moving our website to a new platform. At the moment we’re hosted with Squarespace (it’s like an alternative to Wix or Shopify) and we’ve loved our time with them, so we’re actually quite sad to be leaving. However, Squarespace is an American company and since we VAT registered, we have found that they are missing some features that we could do with having for the future. Also, our checkout is quite temperamental with iPhones and Safari, which we know is a source of irritation to many of you (and probably loses us sales). We’ve had Squarespace look into it, but they have never been able to find anything wrong, so we’ve just had to put up with it.

We will hopefully be moving the website to a British company called Shopwired and we’ve been really busy sorting through all our website pages and copying them across to the new platform. It won’t be live for a couple of weeks yet, but I just wanted to warn you, as I never like it when I visit a website and it suddenly looks different to the last time I saw it! Shopwired is another fully hosted solution, very similar to Squarespace and Shopify, but we think it will be a better match for our needs. Of course there will be some features that we’ll lose (those little hearts at the bottom of blogs, for example), but it will be nice to have a website that hopefully works well with iPhones and handles VAT properly.

From your own side, not much should change with regards to how you use the website and where you find things. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to export all your customer accounts to the new site, but if I can’t, your password might not work and you might need to set up a new account next time you visit. You’ll still be able to check out as a guest though – I hate it when websites force me to have an account, so I don’t want to force anyone to have an account with us! You might find that the website is unavailable for a day or two as we move from one platform to the other, as obviously we will need to perform some test orders to check that everything is working properly (and also check that we know how to process orders before we start accepting them!). We’ll try not to be closed for long and there will be a notice in place as we make the move so you’ll know what’s happening if you do visit during the changeover.

The third announcement is that the PGAD survey is now closed. It has been open for around two years and although I haven’t counted them for a while, I would guess that we’ve had about 200 responses. All of the data will be sorted through and analysed and at some point I will publish the findings. There is a lot to analyse though, so I do not expect to have anything to show for at least a year. I’d like to thank everyone who took part – hopefully your joint efforts will result in some useful breakthroughs regarding how health professionals treat PGAD in the future.

I think that’s all for now! Sorry not to have more for you this month – it’s just been very hectic behind the scenes getting Royal Mail and Shopwired set up!

Tiny x