Help on the New Moon shopping cart.

Welcome to the New Moon shopping cart. This program is rather different from the standardised carts you may be familiar with, in that we have added a set of extra functions to, we hope, make it easier for you to use and to orde from us.

As you will see when you run the cart, it includes a complete product list. You can carry on and order any of the items we sell directly from the cart, without having to back and browse through the catalog pages. While we don't want you to feel that the catalog pages aren't important, we hope that you will find this a fast way of ordering, especially if you are familiar with our range or have ordered from us before.

You may also change the number of items you want, delete them, change your shipping method, and so on, and see the effect on the basket cost immediately displayed on the page, rather than having to go back and forth through a number of pages to do this.

Please note that the shopping cart will take a short time to load (around 20-30 seconds on a normal modem connection), as it also loads all our product data. It will be faster on subsequent loadings, as most of it will normally be cached by your internet browser.

Specific Help

Using the New Moon Shopping Cart

The Selected Item pane

The Details Pane

The Order Pane

The Preview Pane

The Basket display

Payment method

We accept payment by cheque, postal or money order, cash or credit cards. Please note the following restrictions :

Cheques : We accept cheques (made payable to New Moon) in Pounds Sterling or US Dollars ONLY. Please note that if you pay with a dollar cheque we are forced to add a $9 fee for cashing it. We are sorry we have to do this, but this is what our bank charges us (for depositing into a Dollar account!)

Postal/Money orders : Again, these must be in Pounds or US Dollars (mad payable to New Moon). Please note that DESPITE what you are commonly told, a US money order is NOT cash outside of the US, and IS subject to the same $9 fee as a normal cheque.

Cash : We are perfectly happy to accept either pounds or US dollars (please remember that cash is sent through the post at your own risk). We do not normally accept any other currencies.

Credit cards : We accept Mastercard (Access), Visa, Delta and Switch credit cards.

Other payment methods : We do NOT do COD. If your order is very large, we can arrange to have you pay us by bank transfer (in this case, you arramge a transfer at your bank, who then pay our bank directly). This is very safe and convenient, but isnt worth doing unless you are ordering a large amount (we will not normally do this for orders under $500, but if you live in a country where the other methods are for some reason not possible, we will consider it at our discretion)

Order Cost

The shopping cart will calculate the cost of your items, the total, and the cost of shipping (unless you specify courier delivery).

We reserve the right to charge a fee of £1 (UK orders) or £2.50/$4 (foreign orders) for recorded delivery on certain items, if this is necessary. This is a condition imposed on us by the credit card company. Because we have to do this after we recieve your order, we cannot specify it in advance.

How to place your order.

Once you are happy with the selection of items in your basket, use the Preview button to display what you are about to order. The Preview also checks that you have filled in all the data we require, such as name, address, credit card details, etc. If any of these are missing, it will show you what needs to be filled in. You cannot order until you have completed all the necessary information.

Once this is done, press the Order button (located above the main display). This will create the order, displaying it on a new page. This is your last chance to check and (if you wish) cancel the order.

To proceed with your order, press either the Send Order or Send Order With Copy button. These send us your order - you will recieve an automatic message via e-mail soon after to inform you that we have recieved it (please note that this is an automatic check, it doesn't mean we've looked at your order!)

The only difference between the two options is that the With Copy button also e-mails you a copy of your order, so you can be certain of what your ordered. please note that this copy will NOT include your credit card number (if you payed by Credit Card). We encrypt this number before e-mailing it to ourselves (to make sure your number is secure from fraud), so you won't be able to check it.

What happens if I want my order delivered by courier?

The shopping cart calculates out the shipping charges UNLESS you want courier delivery. This is becuase all these orders are charged depending on the actual weight of the package, and we cannot easily calculate them in advance.

Please note that courier delivery is EXPENSIVE!! (Even a small order costs £20/$30). If you are considering this method, we suggest that you e-mail us first (if you have an idea of what you want), and we will try and give you an approximate quote. To be honest, it is very rarely worth sending items by courier (see also the help on order delivery times)

Delivery Times

We quote on our site and in our Catalog a delivery time of 7-28 days (this does NOT include postage times!).

We try and send out orders much faster than this, however the nature of many of our items means that next-day delivery is usually impractical. Many items we stock are made or put together on reciept of your order, which takes time. Also we try and keep our stocks of certain items small, (for example herbs that we don't get regular requests for), in order to ensure the items are as fresh as possible when sent. While we always try to anticipate when stocks are getting low, sometimes there may be a small delay while we re-order. Finally some of our items are in irregular supply, (not helped by the occasional shipping delays caused by our wonderful Customs and Excise) or in the worst case have to be specially made to order.

In view of the above, we expect to ship out all orders within 3-10 days of reciept of your order. If for any reason we don't think we can ship inside this period, we will e-mail you explaining what the problem is, and what our estimate of the delay will be.

Some items are marked up on selecting them as Special Order. All these have to be made or produced specially, and so we will try and give an estimate of these. If you want to order a number of items, only some of which are Special Order, you might find it convenient to split the Special Order items into a separate order to avoid any holdups with stock items.

Postage times vary depending on your location. As a ROUGH guide (please note we are not responsible for the time post takes to arrive!!) you can assume something like this :

Delivery in the UK - 2 days for packets, up to 5 for parcels (we normally use letter post, which is faster, except for some heavy items)

Europe - delivery seems to take around a week, but its rather variable (we suspect due to the wonderful 'frontierless' EEC, but...)

North America - Air mail usually takes around a week, surface post around 5 weeks.

Rest of the World - this is usually slower than North America - a rough guide is 1-2 weeks airmail, 5-8 weeks surface.

Please remember that Customs and Postal services have a penchant for delaying packages at whim, and we can do nothing about this! We hop to be setting up an order tracing system in the future, which will allow you to check if your order has been sent, and if so when and by what method.