Warning : This is a long post!
Hi, my name is Jonny Anderson and I am the brother of David Anderson, who you may know as the person who started MrSnuff. David has stepped away from the daily running of the business and has asked me to take over. David remains as a product advisor and general repository of knowledge and experience.
My background is in IT and finance but over the last year I have been busy behind the scenes learning all about MrSnuff. I am now turning my attention to the core business: the products MrSnuff sells; your experience on the web sites; improving shipping; reducing returns due to customs; and customer service.
Shipping
MrSnuff has overhauled its shipping to the US. We are now using a mechanism called âeCom-in-a-Boxâ which allows us to send all our parcels from our UK (Isle of Man) warehouse to the US in batches (boxes). The individual parcels are then unpacked and injected into the US postal system. This makes our shipping cheaper and more reliable.
Many businesses use their shipping costs to encourage or discourage customer behaviour, or as an alternative revenue source. We performed a thorough cost analysis of our shipping and the price you see now accurately matches our costs. Simplicity and transparency was our goal.
The only debate we had was whether to provide a flat rate or a graded rate depending on the recipientâs US postal zone. We found that the variation was actually marginal because most of the cost was getting the parcel from the Isle of Man to the US, and this is fixed per parcel. So we decided on a simple flat rate.
We also removed the option of the cheaper untracked alternative. All parcels are now sent tracked. This is because the untracked option generated a lot of customer service emails which then had to factored into the shipping cost. Simplicity was cheaper in the end.
The downside with eCom-in-a-Box is that tracking only begins when the parcel is injected into the US postal system. This creates a delay of a few days before the tracking registers any changes. This delay is disconcerting and is the single biggest source of customer service emails. We are working on a solution to this. Possibly two tracking links, one for the first leg that tracks the box (containing your parcel) between the Isle of Man and the US, and a second link that tracks the parcel through the USPS system.
Destination Countries
I was asked to perform the data analysis to establish which countries MrSnuff and MrSnuff UK should sell to. This was triggered by our payment processorâs risk assessment team. They told us to localise our sales; so UK sites should sell to the UK and the US site to the US. This is because the payment processorâs risk algorithms penalise tobacco sales to multiple jurisdictions - the more countries you sell to the more likely you are to be breaking local laws, they say.
So I looked at the sales and the returns. I also looked at how often returns were due to customs rejections, or non-payment of local taxes and duties by the recipient. This allowed me to rank the countries and eliminate those that didnât meet the threshold. The results were sobering. The list of countries that made it through this process is given below.
Valid Destination Countries - MrSnuff UK
France, Germany, Iceland, Isle of Man, Norway, Spain, Switzerland , United Kingdom
Valid Destination Countries - MrSnuff (USA)
Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, United States
To pick an example: Ireland had a 36% return rate on sales of just ÂŁ1,242 for the year. Given the cost per return is fixed, this means the relative cost per return for Ireland was above the cut-off threshold. Many countries were way off, with some at nearly 100% returns.
On the bright side we have recently applied for and received an EU IOSS number. This reduces the customs friction at the EU border and, once this is all setup, we will run trials to see if we can get the number of returns below the threshold for all EU countries.
Customer Service
We have appointed a new customer service operative. She is Kay Anderson and if any of you have had an email answered over the last two months you have been speaking to her. She is really smart and kind and will do everything she can to sort out your problems.
We are also experimenting with AI to try and speed up the response times for standard enquiries. This will include something called âsentiment analysisâ to automatically prioritise friendly emails. It is an interesting experiment.
Products
We have recently removed a swathe of products from MrSnuff. These were products that our payment processor considered high-risk, such as spoons, sniffers, bullets, smoking related products, CBD and anything that could remotely be considered drug-related. We also discontinued some under-performing snuffs. The good news is that this frees us up to expand our range of core snuff products to compensate.
If your favourite snuff has suddenly disappeared, and you want it back, let me know so we can reconsider the numbers.
Websites
We plan on completely overhauling the design of the websites. We analysed the customer feedback and commissioned some experiments to see if we could nudge up our conversion rate. Some of the changes you may have seen, but making incremental changes is hard with our current tech.
Therefore, as soon as we can, we will be updating our websites with a new, modern interface that should make finding and buying your favourite products much simpler.
Thanks for reading this far. I am really excited to be leading MrSnuff forward. I am sure we can improve your customer experience and still bring you the biggest selection of snuff anywhere on the internet.