Why do we shut down the website so often?
This is a small family operation and it’s only me (Dave Taylor) actually processing the orders. Picking and packing Meccano is very time consuming and if we left the website on continuously we could never keep up. Because we are well established and our website punches well above its weight, we now receive as many orders as we can possibly cope with in a very short period of opening. Apart from processing orders we also prepare for/attend exhibitions and club meetings, chase all over the UK for Meccano collections, then spend hours/days sorting them. Ordering and checking off parts from suppliers is very time consuming, as is updating the website, plus all the dozens of other tasks involved with a business.

So why don’t you employ staff?
Good question; We operate from home and there’s not really enough room, so we would have to find premises, with all the extra costs and extra work that would entail. To cover the cost of staff and premises we would need to considerably increase our turnover, which would mean having to register (and pay) VAT. So unless we increased the size of the business exponentially we would only make the same profit for much more investment, work and risk. Thats not going to happen as I already work very long hours and I'm approaching retirement age. While I’m not planning to stop yet, I do have to get a sensible work/life balance.

If you are getting more orders than you can cope with should you increase prices?
That would be an option and in any case inflation, constantly increasing cost of supplies and other overheads does make this necessary from time to time. However as a Meccano enthusiast, I genuinely want to do help keep our wonderful hobby alive and I have no desire to rip people off!
So I’m afraid we are stuck with regulating sales by switching off the checkout so we can catch up, and dare I say it, have an occasional break.

So please be patient. We are doing our best!

Why does the the total cost sometimes vary by a penny or two?

This is because we once did a blanket perecentage price change, which introduced hidden amounts to 4 places of decimal. This can cause totals to vary slightly for no apparent reason! Sorry, there are far to many prices to round down individually, so I just change them when I access them for other reasons.