Postage & Packing
We try to keep our P&P charges as simple as possible:-
UK buyer's risk: £2; UK fully Insured £6 (+£1 per £1,000)
USA buyer's risk: $10; USA fully insured $40 (+$1 per $1,000)
EU buyer's risk: €8; EU fully insured €16 (+€1 per €1,000) Canada & Caribbean: As per USA (or equivalent in US dollars)
Rest of World: Generally as for EU, we will advise if different.
More About Postage Packing & Insurance (to follow).

Note: We do not use recorded delivery as it affords no real advantages over normal post. Although it offers compensation up to £26, this excludes valuables such as coins and money. If for some reason, you would like us to use it, please add the relevant fee.
Our UK fully insured delivery is by Royal Mail Special Delivery, which used to be called Registered.
We normally send "buyers risk" items by second class post, as we are informed that Royal Mail no longer operated any method of sorting and separating the 2 classes. Optimists will conclude that all post now goes by first class, pessimists will conclude that it all goes second class.

VAT
All our prices including postage and packing include VAT where applicable.

General
Chard are based in Blackpool Lancashire, and were established before 1964.
Originally we dealt only in coins including gold sovereigns. We now deal also in gold bullion coins and bars, and jewellery. On our jewellery side we specialise in high quality good value gold jewellery with some platinum, and diamond rings of our own design and make.
Although we have a showroom, most of our business is done by mail order. We ship worldwide.
In 1998 we launched our first website. As the internet provides an ideal method of delivering our specialised products, we have since expanded our web presence to more than 3,000 pages on over 20 websites.
As a small specialist business, we aim to market ourselves to better educated customers who appreciate accurate information, honesty and good value. We like to enjoy our work, and sometimes do things a little differently from our mass market competitors.
We try to keep our terms simple and fair.
We are human and not perfect.
We hope you will enjoy dealing with us.
If you have any queries or problems, a phone call is often quicker and better than e-mail.

Copyright
All images and textual material on all our websites and ebay items is copyright. Please see our Copyright Infringement page.

Ebay Cock-Up
On Sunday 29th February 2004, we found all our current ebay auctions had disappeared. We suspended our occasional day of on Sunday and came into the office, to find out what it was about. What we found amazed us at ebay's incompetence.

More Information About Specific Items
We explain why we have removed the "more information about this product" links from our ebay auction listings.

EBay Feedback System
A simple concept, a good idea, but badly flawed because of the poor way it is run.

More eBay System Failures
Did we ever mention that many of eBay's features and systems fail to work properly, and the sheer frustration of trying to get things done. the failures often compound one upon the the other.

Negative Feedback
We welcome all feedback. and hope that all our buyers will wish to leave appropriate feedback.
We have received a number of negatives, which we are very concerned about. We are also annoyed about them, as we believe that none of them are justified, and in no case have the authors followed ebay's guidelines particularly "contacting the seller or buyer to resolve the issue - either by email or phone - before you leave feedback."
Unfortunately ebay do not allow enough space to make full comments in response to negative feedback, so we have provided our own page with expanded comments.

Other Complaints

Questions
We intend to include an FAQ page. Although we try to cover most questions on our items listings, there is always somebody out there who manages to think of a question that either we hadn't thought of, or considered too obvious to mention without insulting anyone's intelligence.

An Example of the Economics of Selling A Krugerrand on Ebay
This page may help to explain some of the calculations we make when selling an item on ebay, just hw little profit we make, why we charge extra for credit cards, and more besides.

Ending Auctions Early and Cancelling Bids
We sometimes cancel ebay items if it appears they are not going to reach a sufficient price. This is entirely legitimate, but please read this page if you are in any doubt.

How to Retract a Wrong Bid
And why you should so promptly if you have made a mistake in bidding.

Starting Prices & Reserve Prices
We explain the difference, and tell you which we use and why.

Free Gold Sovereigns and Krugerrands
Sounds too good to be true? Yes, of course it does, but it was only one of hundreds of dodgy offers we have seen on ebay and elsewhere.