How to Order from Chard

Product Categories
We sell four main product categories:-
Collectors Coins
Bullion Coins
Gold Jewellery
Diamond Rings

Gold Jewellery, Diamond Rings, Collectors Coins
We try to keep most of our products in stock, so we don't ask you to wait 28 days for delivery.
For all our products except bullion coins, we provide a 7 day return privilege scheme, which operates quite simply:-
Make out your order, you can print out our on-screen order forms for some items, and post it with your cheque. If you wish you can telephone or e-mail first to check the item is still available. Once we receive your order for a stock item, we will normally despatch it within 24 hours. We can e-mail you on despatch if you wish. Once you receive the item, you have 7 days to return it, in original condition, if you do not wish, for any reason, to keep it. On the rare occasion this happens, we like to know why, to try to avoid it in future. Less than 1% of our approval sales are returned.
For expensive items, we may wish to make enquiries, and we reserve the right to present or clear your cheque before despatch.

Urgent Orders
If your order is urgent, we suggest you post it to us first class, with your cheque, mark your order "Urgent" or tell us when you need the item for, and opt for the "Fully Insured via Special Delivery" choice. You will get your order quicker than using our competitors who will take your money by credit card and make you wait 28 days for delivery. If you wish, phone us first to check we have the item in stock. If you e-mail us to ask, you may lose an extra day, as we attend to orders before enquiries.

Bullion Coins
For bullion coins, the basis of all transactions is the underlying gold price, and all transactions are agreed on a firm sale basis, they are not subject to our usual 7 days, without reason, return privilege. They are naturally still covered by our normal guarantee that all coins we sell are genuine, and in normal acceptable condition for that type of coin. On all bullion coin orders, we clear cheques before despatch, allowing a full week. The order will then normally be posted within 48 hours. During periods of high demand this may be exceeded.

Credit / Debit Cards
We do not currently accept credit cards. Personal callers to our showroom may use debit cards such as Switch and Delta.
We were looking at accepting credit cards via our web site, using a secure server, but have shelved any plans for various reasons.
Most banks and credit card companies are very wary about transactions where the card-holder is not present, which obviously includes telephone and mail order methods.
There are several reasons why historically we have not offered credit card facilities.
One, for bullion coins, the credit card commission often exceeds our profit margin!
Secondly, we sell our jewellery and coins at very competitive "Cash & Carry" prices, so that card commissions would seriously affect our margins.
Most of our showroom customers find an alternative way to pay us. Perhaps 50% of showroom customers offer a credit card, over 99% find an alternative. To get the extra 1% (of sales), we would have to give away 3% of 50% = 1.5% of our sales revenue, or about 5% of our profit.

More About Credit Cards
We increasingly get asked why we don't accept credit card telephone orders, or online ordering, so we will try to give a further insight into why we don't yet offer these facilities.
On all card-holder not present (CNP) transactions, there is full recourse on the vendor up to 12 or even 18 months after the transaction. If a card-holder decided they wanted to reject the transaction, they could claim reimbursement from their credit card company, who would ultimately be obliged to repay them, particularly as they had never signed a payment voucher. The banks therefore expect a guarantee from the trader.
There is currently no way for a trader to check that a purchaser is giving their correct postal address, therefore fraud is quite simple. As we sell high intrinsic value goods, we would be seen by the credit card companies as an obvious target for fraudulent purchasers. We did indeed, some years ago, detect and stop an attempted £10,500 fraud.
Our best offer so far for mail order credit card facilities has been from Roynet, who apart from insisting that we transfer our business banking to Royal Bank of Scotland, insist on us lodging a deposit of 25% of our projected first year credit card sales, with the deposit being adjusted in line with actual sales. So if we projected £20,000 credit card sales,we would have to lodge a £5,000 deposit. The more successful our credit card sales proved, the more we would be required to top up our deposit. Assuming we did £20,000 of CC sales in the first month, the annual projection would rise to £240,000, and the deposit would rise to £60,000. So Roynet would pay us our £20,000 less its commission of almost £600, and we would need to give them an extra £55,000 deposit.
If we were so successful that our sales hit £1,000,000 in the first month, we would have to hand over £3,000,000 of it to Roynet!
Financing a 25% deposit would cost us about an extra 2.5%, without even thinking about the cost of customer fraud.
Of course, we could do what most High Street businesses do, stick an extra 10% on our prices!

UK Orders
Mail order to any UK address is simple and easy.
For most goods we charge £2 postage, recorded delivery at our discretion, or £5 if you require registered (special delivery), for any quantity. For low value, bulky goods, we will charge carriage and packing at cost.

International Orders
We are happy to arrange despatch anywhere in the world. Some of our pages quote US Dollar rates and even have their own US order forms. If you would like a quote, please contact us. We calculate most foreign exchange transactions at typical bank tourist rates. The trickiest part for us is to work out the best method and cost of postage. If you are unsure about how much, you can always leave the amount blank, but endorse your cheque "not exceeding" whatever amount you think.

Tax - VAT
In the UK, there is VAT - Value Added Tax payable on most sales, and normally included in our prices. Orders outside the EC will normally be tax free, which is equivalent to about 15% discount. This does not apply to most second-hand or antique items.
The buyer will be responsible for any import duty or other taxes which are payable on import.

Order Forms
We don't provide order forms for every item. If we did, they would need to be in at least 10 different currencies, so we just provide them for the most popular items.

Order Form for Coins

Special Orders
For special orders, where we are custom making an item to your specification, we will always try to quote you a reasonable estimate of delivery time, which will vary according to the item.

Feedback
We are always interested in feedback and criticism. if you have any secrets to share with us, please feel free!