The Incredibly Bad - Littlewoods Europe No More!!

So yesterday, I visted the Littlewoods Europe Site and instead of finding my beloved shopping site, I found this message;

And my first reaction can be pretty much summed up in the following manner;

Then this;

I know it is just a shopping site, and there are millions like it, but I am incredibly bummed for the following reasons;

1. had a great selection of plus-sized clothing 

2. reasonably priced

3. had a great selection of basics and workwear, which other plus-size sites barely offer

4. delivered to Malta

5. had a visible review section which helped a lot when making decisions before purchasing

6. had great customere service

7. great shipping rates

Now mind you, the clothes haven't always been the best quality or the best fitting as their brands seemed to have a tendency to run short on the torso length.  Regardless of such disadvantage, the advantages outweigh them.  

 Being a plus-size girl I'm very limited in where to buy, starting from Malta where the retail shops apart from selling over-priced rubbish garments, the garments themselves are outdated, look cheap (not in the material sense but in the slutty sense) and are mostly suitable for women above their 50s.  When it comes to internet sites there aren't many that ship to Malta unfortunately.  The irony is many sites state they deliver to Europe and Malta is NOT included in the list.  Hello there ... we have been an EU member for almost 10 years now!  Some of these site owners need a geography lesson asap! 

Anyway now back to Littlewoods Europe, so obviously I did some research on why they decided to no longer operate and found this comment on their facebook page explaining the situation;

For me the reason provided was quite pathetic to be honest. As all many companies need to do is just put on some stamps and ship the stuff to these countries, it is not like people have different tastes in clothing and so there isn't a supply.  If they had a problem they could have just raised the delivery costs.  Also from a purely business perspective opening your business to other countries increases profit, not the other way round! It's good that you need to focus on your UK and Ireland customers, but I do not think providing a service to other countries decreased such 'focus', especially when comparing the European site and the UK site, the UK customers still had more choices, while the European site had much less choices in comparison.  Moreover, if they wanted more customers in the international market, then they should have advertised.  I only found this site less than a year ago, because a friend told me about it and she found out about it when she was looking for a specific brand and not because she saw an advert! Other sites like boohoo, Asos and Newlook do bother in advertising and also have more active Facebook pages, which has shown to help in increasing business.  Instead of closing the site, Littlewoods should have fired their marketing team as it did a lousy job. 

I hope the company changes its mind, as I'm not the only one expressing my disappointment that the company is not offering its services to us Europeans.  

If any readers out there have knowledge of other plus-size sites which offer reasonable shipping and priced clothing and is within the EU (I don't wish to end up paying a huge amount in tax for ordering outside the EU) then please do share.