80% of our MAIL ORDER business is now conducted entirely online from our website. The number of written orders received by post or taken over the telephone continues to decline.

After the massive increase in postage costs last spring it now costs 76p to post each of you a catalogue.  Each catalogue also costs us just over £1.00 to design and print excluding all the time and effort involved in proofing it each year.

So every year we award you a, hopefully, nice present costing us around £2.00.  However all this information together with many more pictures and much more cultural advice on each plant category is readily available online at no cost to you and relatively little cost to us!

The time is fast approaching where we will not need to produce a pictorial catalogue and mail it to the 15,000 customers who have ordered from us recently.  Mailing our full customer database which now approaches 40,000 names is no longer cost effective or affordable.  You would be the first to complain if our plant prices were to become too high!

Those of you (like me) who are still one-fingered internet novices or do not have access to the internet at all need not despair!  The customer feedback section on our website, which everyone can see, contains frequent requests and pleas for Burncoose to continue to produce a pictorial mail order catalogue AND WE WILL!

Just to put this into context our website was visited by 750,000 visitors in 2012.  This figure excludes visitors from the European Union (if it still exists by the time you read this) and elsewhere overseas.  On average visitors spend 3 minutes on the site.  Many of them clearly do still have our catalogue open beside their computer.

One of the most welcome features of the last year has been the considerable growth of our TRADE mail order business with landscapers, garden designers, garden centres and parks departments.  Although our catalogue already contains many discounts for quantity orders, ANDREW MILLS, our Nursery Manager and his team, are delighted to quote highly competitive prices for larger trade orders very quickly.  We now pack and despatch these orders daily on pallets by overnight courier.  You can therefore have your plants when and where you want them to suit your business and your customers.

We are delighted to report that well over 70% of your orders were being despatched within 5 working days last year.  This is less than half the time we allow ourselves in our Terms of Business in the busy Spring months.  We are improving.

2012 has been another record year in terms of order numbers.  The third on the trot in fact so we must be doing something right!

This would only be possible because of the loyalty of so many of our mail order customers and for their favourable comments to their gardening friends.

We are extremely grateful and will continue to provide exclusive SPECIAL OFFERS to our ‘best’ customers not just by email but YES(!) BY POST too!

THANK YOU AND BEST WISHES FOR A “DROUGHT” FREE 2013!  WHAT A ‘SUMMER’ WE JUST HAD!