Yes Published.

Steve's novel Exodus was published in January, 2012!

Since BritShopS became dormant, Steve has had time to concentrate on his other passion — writing. To date he has completed his first novel, Exodus, has written several short stories — one of which received a commendation in the 2009 Yeovil Literary Prize competition — and the second novel is well on its way. To find out more and read some of Steve's writing, take a look at his web site http://www.stevewilliamsauthor.co.uk/ .

It is with regret that we announce today that BritShopS will temporarily cease trading at midnight on 1st June 2008.

When BritShopS was formed, the short term strategy was to run the business solely on the internet with a long term view towards opening a High Street shop. Whilst continuing to operate via the Internet, the shop would give us a footprint, albeit small, on the High Street.

The benefits would have been twofold. Firstly, and most obviously, we would have had a high profile presence which would have helped expand both the business and our reputation. Secondly, the shop premises would have provided a warehouse from which to supply the internet side of the business.

We have taken great care to select our suppliers as well as our market and we have reached individual agreements with each supplier on prices which was fair both to them and to our customers.

Sadly, over recent months, delivery costs have become prohibitively expensive and, in order to maintain a profit margin, we would have had to renegotiate prices with the suppliers. As most of our suppliers are small businesses who are feeling the pinch as much as the rest of us, we were not prepared to try to drive down the supply prices without a significant increase in stock purchase. Hence the need for a warehouse.

We tried our best but, unfortunately, we are unable to keep our delivery prices as low as they have been. Owing to the actual cost of delivery and packing materials, we cannot absorb quite as much of the postage and packing costs and must pass a little more on to our customers.

As of today, delivery charges will be as follows:
For orders up to and including £30, the charge for P&P will be £6;
for orders up to and including £50, the charge for P&P will be £9;
for all orders over £50, delivery will be FREE.
All of these figures include VAT.

You will see that there are no .99s in these figures, in line with our objection to psychological pricing -- see our Fair Price Policy -- just straight forward prices based on the costs to us. Please be assured that we have done our best to keep the costs we pass on to you, our customers, as low as possible.

The last few weeks have been a difficult time for the major supermarkets in the media. You may have noticed in the national papers extracts from a Which? report that found shoppers who were buying consumable and perishable items from the supermarkets over the Internet were finding that, in some cases, the items arrived within just one day of their 'use by' date! An investigation by Which? revealed that, on average, groceries chosen online had a considerably shorter shelf life than those purchased in-store.

Subsequently there were further newspaper accusations that supermarkets were 'profiteering' after it emerged that some of them are increasing their delivery charges for online orders in the run up to Christmas.

Tomorrow, 1st December 2007, sees BritShopS attending the second of it's local fairs in as many weeks. We will be at the Wickham Court Fair in Layhams Road, West Wickham, Kent and will again have an extensive selection of products available from our ever increasing range. Come along and join us! The fair starts at 12.00pm and will finish at 3.30pm. There will be lots of stalls to visit apart from ours and all sorts of fun and games for children and grown-ups alike!

We look forward to seeing you there and we will let you know how we get on.

Look out for more news next week with details of the next fair on December 8th!

As you may have seen from our previous news items, BritShopS made it's first ever appearance at a public Fair when we hosted a stall at the St Francis of Assisi Church Bazaar in West Wickham, Kent last Saturday. We were delighted with the interest shown by those who visited us. We had, as you can see from the picture, three of the BritShopS team manning the stall and a huge range of items from across our broad range of available products. The event was so successful we actually ran out of some stock and had to take orders over the counter for subsequent delivery. We have also taken a number of orders from people who visited the stall and took away one of our advertising leaflets, and we are busy putting those together for despatch this week.

As a result of our success at the St Francis Bazaar we have been approached by another local organisation and asked to put together another stall for a local fair in December. Watch this space for more news on the next BritShopS appearance!

STOP PRESS. Make that two local fairs in December.

We are pleased to announce an upcoming art exhibition by our 'resident artist' Greg D'Souza. Greg will be exhibiting many of his magnificent pieces at the Art For All Studio, 211~213 High Street, Bromley, Kent, beginning on Saturday 24th November 2007 and concluding on Saturday 8th December. The exhibition will be open between the hours of 9.30am and 5.30pm and on many of the days Greg will be at the exhibition himself, so you will have the opportunity to meet the artist in person and see some of the pieces we have featured on the BritShopS website.

To celebrate the exhibition we are offering a Christmas Discount on all of Greg's artwork featured on our website, but be quick… this offer must end on Boxing Day 2007.

To celebrate the rich diversity of British grown apples, Sunday 21st October 2007 is Apple Day. This tradition was started back in 1990 by Common Ground to celebrate this the best time of year to harvest the humble British apple, sometimes known as the Season of Mellow Fruitfulness. This year sees a bumper crop due to the heavy rains and warm weather and we at BritShopS would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the British orchards. By way of celebration, we are making a limited time offer on our broad selection of British produced apple juices. From midnight on Sunday 21st October 2007 until midnight on Sunday 28th October 2007 we will send an additional five pound gift voucher to customers who purchase any bottles of apple juice from our fine range.

Why not visit the BritShopS Shopping Site today and see the selection of juices we have on offer, from the old favourites (Cox) through to the exotic (Spartan or Jonagold) we have a large selection of juices to choose from. But hurry, the offer must end at midnight on Sunday 28th October 2007.