Terms and Conditions
Buying
We sell you the book or accessory at the price on the website and deliver it right away. For orders outside the UK, we add a small postal charge.
Returns
If you don’t like or want the book or accessory then please return to us and we will refund or replace the guide straight away. No quibbles, no fuss, we will just sort it out.
Privacy
We keep all your information confidential and do not sell or share it with anyone. View details of our Privacy Policy.
Shipping method
Unfortunately, the whole business of shipping makes things a bit more complicated. Wrestling with the world’s postal and courier system will make anything more complicated, but that is our problem, not yours.
Orders up to four items are sent through the postal system. Orders for five books or more are sent by courier, generally DPD. This is a signed for service to ensure safe delivery, the same standard that we would use for a trade customer. We will let you have parcel tracking information as soon as it is available so you can tweak delivery arrangements if you need to. We appreciate that sometimes this is a bit fiddly and it is hard for you to be in, but we have found it’s the best way to ensure that deliveries of larger parcels get through to you.
All orders are sent out as soon as possible, but certainly within 48 hours. Please note that our warehouse BookSource, who help us on storage and shipping generally don’t work Saturdays, Sundays or Bank Holidays.
UK orders should arrive in three working days or fewer.
European orders should arrive in seven working days, but sometimes postal services are slow so this could be as long as 10 working days/two weeks. If it’s longer, please get in touch and we will see if we can follow up from our end. We do not use a full tracking service.
For the rest of the world, please allow up to 30 working days. It’s not unknown for a postal service to send an airmail parcel by sea mail, in which case we are all stuffed and we will send you a replacement immediately, by airmail!
Shipping costs
Orders to UK addresses are sent by FIRST CLASS POSTAGE for ALL orders through the website. We make no postal charge.
For Europe, we do make a small postal charge of £3 per book.
For the rest of the world, the postal charges are £5 per book. These charges reflect our actual postage costs.
Discounts
Discount codes will not apply to items already on sale and only one discount code can be used per order.
Payment
We accept Visa, Mastercard, Switch/Maestro cards through our secure payment provider, Stripe. These card transactions are certified by Instant SSL as a secure site. All transactions take place on a secure server.
In addition, we also take payment by PayPal. Click on the PayPal button on checkout to use this.
This means that Cicerone does not and will not have your credit card information, which is why we cannot save your payment information – everything is done through specialist secure payment providers.
Countries we cannot reach
Unfortunately, after bitter experience of credit card payment problems and failure of books to get delivered, we have with reluctance and regret concluded that we cannot offer a reliable service to some countries.
This list will change from time to time, but right now includes Russia, Palestine, North Korea (not that we have received many orders from there), Israel, and South Africa.
This irritates us almost as much as it must irritate you. Our apologies, but in these few cases we cannot offer a service we consider to be acceptable so we must ask you to buy Cicerone guides through another internet retailer.
Taxes and duties
There is no UK VAT on print or eBook book sales. Strictly speaking, they are zero-rated, i.e. the VAT is calculated at 0%.
For VAT in EU countries, see below. For the rest of the world, there is no VAT on our exported sales.
VAT in EU countries
Under new rules from mid-2021, we are required to add VAT at the relevant rate for each EU country. This is applied at checkout when we know the location of the delivery, or, for an eBook, the purchaser’s home address, depending on whether it is a book or an eBook. VAT rates vary between 0% (books to Ireland) and 25% (sales to Denmark).
VAT is also applied to shipping costs, but not on any donations made to support our charity partners.
Each parcel is stickered with Cicerone’s EU VAT number (we are registered in France). This means that the book should be sent straight to you without any taxes or customs duties added, but if they are it is almost certainly being done wrongly so please let us know.
Duties and customer charges are the responsibility of the country to which the books are being sent. Usually there are no such charges, but if there are it is the responsibility of the purchaser.
Maximum value per order
The maximum value per order for orders outside the UK is €150 (roughly £120 or 6-8 books). This is to comply with EU rules under the VAT scheme and ensures parcels are below customs levels. This is also applied to all international orders so if things go astray (which can unfortunately happen) the damage isn’t too bad.
About BookSource
BookSource is Cicerone’s distribution partner. BookSource is a professional book distributor based in Glasgow. We keep our books in their warehouse, all our orders go to them, they pack and post our books to you, and send all payments to us. Your internet order will go directly to them and they will send it straight to you. You can imagine how useful this service is to us.
We do this for two main reasons.
Firstly, so we can be sure to give all our customers the best possible professional service, however large or small they may be.
Secondly, so we can concentrate on the work of publishing high quality guides, keeping them up to date and accurate, and telling all our customers and users about them.
BookSource issues its invoicing documentation for us. Don’t let this worry you at all – they are doing it on our behalf. In terms of privacy, BookSource and ourselves hold all your information totally confidentially, and solely for the purposes of processing your order.
Find out more about BookSource.