seeknulfind

While I'm relatively new here and I mostly lurk, this post caught my eye. As I manage an ecommerce site for a living (nothing to do with leather), thisis one topic I have intimate knowledge of. Some mentioned earlier (paraphrasing) how shipping is the bane of internet commerce. This is so true. At best it is tough. While our shipping is mostly accurate, some glitches cannot always be helped. By the way, we ship a variety of products from hydraulic fittings - heavy and compact to leaf vacuum hose - large and light, so I can shed some light on several areas. That said, please allow I do not claim to have the final word on anything. Your own experience may vary. One shipping rep - FedEx guy I think, blamed Amazon for much of the crack down on shipping costs. He cited something we've all experienced - how they love to ship tiny objects in comparatively huge packages. Thinking about this, I partly agree as even I can figure out each truck has only so much space. Hence the introduction a couple of years back of "dimensional weight" i.e. they assign a weight value to the size of the package to compensate for wasted space. This is not the only thing. UPS still charges a "fuel surcharge" to compensate for high fuel costs. Yeah. Right. There are a couple of takeaways here: First, there are "sweet spots" when it comes to shipping. Smaller packages (One common size we use is 14x8x8) weighing up to 40 lbs tend to ship economically for us. I tell our customers if they want to save money to buy the small heavier stuff in as large a quantity as they can. No, this is not some ploy to increase sales. Even if I did not make the same no matter how much or little they buy, I always try to do my best to serve the customers. (About half my time is spent in sales.) Second, for larger packages, they are going to cost more. Period. Think about that box truck. No matter what the shippers will make more money shipping lots of small packages than a few big ones. They are GOING to make money! The best defense for this is for shippers to pack as much into as small a space as possible. I know this can be a daunting task. Our other nemesis is hydraulic hose. My suggestion for those shipping hides, if you don't do this already is to consider long cylindrical or rectangular boxes. We often ship up to 6 in x 12 ft vac hose in 8x8x60-72" boxes (The hose compresses) Similarly, we also ship 8-12 in diameter hoses in similar lengths. We've found the tall boxes tend to cost less overall than our other option - the 30x30x18 in monsters. While we do offer "free shipping" on some items, I often tell my customers there is no free shipping. It is a myth. As someone pointed out, shipping is actually calculated into the selling price. Seriously. What? Does anyone really think someone is going to lose money for the privilege of sending your stuff? Please excuse the sarcasm here but I actually deal with some customers who seem to have trouble grasping this concept, so I'm passing this thought along to emphasize the point. For that matter, on those items we do offer "free" shipping on, you can bet the costs are calculated to land in our favor most of the time. We do sometimes take a hit but not often. One more thing and I'll shut up. Over the years, I've gotten fairly adept at getting fairly accurate shipping costs most of the time. Where things go wrong is when someone orders items that short circuit the software. For example, I cannot teach the software that two clamps that weigh nothing and easily slip inside a vac hose, costs nothing to ship - so it adds shipping... for the entire order. Oy. What doe we do when stuff like this happens? We refund excess shipping charges. I noticed some vendors here do this also. Frankly I prefer to deal with vendors who will do this as a matter of course. If you sell online and you do this, it may behoove you to state it plainly on your site. This is not to say, people won't call or complain anyway but it may cut down on these instances and you may see a few less abandoned carts.