I don't mind if shipping isn't free. I do mind if the shipping cost isn't queriable until I:
1) Add the item to the cart
2) Create an account
3) Enter all my personal info
If your business makes it that much of a hassle to find out what shipping costs (presumably in order to capture sales), I'm indisposed to patronizing it. Transparency and lack of hassle are what I'm after, not free shipping.
Totally agree. I find that process extremely annoying as well. I usually never buy from those sites unless I absolutely cannot find the product at a similar price elsewhere.
Although, shipping prices can vary based on the total purchase since they aren't perfectly linear and it costs less to ship 5 items together in one package than each of those individually. So, I would say that adding the item to your cart is a requirement, but the rest should not be necessary at all. Also, shipping prices vary based on the total distance so the destination zip code matters as well.
I would say that the best solution would be to put an approximate shipping cost for that item being shipped by itself such that the shipping cost covers ~2 standard deviations for the US. If that were done, 95% of the time that cost would be valid or even less. Only in 5% of the cases would the shipping cost increase. In actuality, it would probably be even less than 5% because of the way supply chains work and where they put warehouses and fulfillment centers. This does lend itself to a possible legal issue, though, because people would claim that the stated shipping price as advertised is not what was actually paid. It would have to be explicitly stated very clearly that the displayed shipping cost before you put it into the cart and enter a destination zip code is just an estimate.
as a reasonably smart individual, when doing price comparison shopping, you would obviously compare the final out of pocket cost, selling price + shipping + tax
I'm not sure how this responds to my comment? All I said was that "free shipping" is exactly the same thing as saying "I estimate that shipping is generally below $X, but if it turns out to cost more, I will eat that cost".
the imply was that some retailers will jack up the cost of an item in order to provide free shipping. I'm just pointing out that doesn't really work unless the buyer is stupid and uniquely drawn to the free shipping offer.
About the only thing worse than that is inflated mysterious "shipping". An SD card with $17 shipping and when I add a second the shipping just doubles? Then it comes USPS first class package with $2.60 right on the label???
They must be just trying to piss me off.
Edit: This is likely the result of automatic "value based" shipping calculation. Don't let it create absurd situations like the above, it makes people feel cheated.
Well, that's confusing too. If you show a shipping cost on the item, your average consumer would expect that they could buy just that item for that shipping price. After all, doesn't everyone hate the Amazon Add-On Program for exactly that reason? It's Prime but not really Prime.
What if you have multiple tabs open? If you add another product in the meantime then the shipping cost quoted would be totally inaccurate. Could be too high, could also be too low depending on how your order crosses the weight/size thresholds.
Also, that would mean that you have to total up the weights and hit the shipping API for every single page request. Right now you usually only get an icon that tells you "3 items in cart", sometimes not even that much. If you have multiple warehouses this gets even more complex, you essentially have an NP-complete optimization problem. That may not even be possible to do in real time, let alone on every page load.
I just disagree in general over the value of the feature here. There is a lot of potential for misinformation and confusion, and consumers are already trained that they go to the shopping cart to get the shipping price. The shopping cart (the order) is the quantum used for shipping costs and it makes sense to put it there.
Again, to echo others, I hate sites that make me log in and go through the checkout process to get a shipping cost. But there's nothing wrong with going to the shopping cart and typing in my ZIP.
I'm fine with Amazon's add-on program - it lets me get small low-priced items much cheaper than they would be if they were priced to cover the shipping cost.
For example, a 2 pack of Sharpie pens is $1.77 with "add-on" shipping, $3.09 from a non-amazon merchant with 1 week shipping, or $6.98 from Amazon for prime 2 day shipping.
If I'm not in a hurry, I can either add it to my cart and keep it there until I find $23 more stuff to purchase, or I can buy the $3.09 product and wait a week for it to arrive.
If I'm in a hurry, I can pay the $7 or keep shopping until I hit the $25 add-on shipping limit (which is usually not too hard to do, I can add laundry detergent or some other consumables that I know I'll need).
What's not to like? Fast shipping if I want it (and am willing to pay for it), slower shipping if I don't.
Still better than making a special trip to Office Max (a 20 minute drive) just to get a pen.
> Well, that's confusing too. If you show a shipping cost on the item, your average consumer would expect that they could buy just that item for that shipping price.
Displaying it as "If you add this item to your current order, it would increase the order's shipping cost by an estimated $0.00" ought to allay any such confusion.
> If you have multiple warehouses this gets even more complex, you essentially have an NP-complete optimization problem. That may not even be possible to do in real time, let alone on every page load.
The shipping cost of the items in the cart could be calculated once whenever the contents of the cart changes, and the number cached. So you'd be doing one shipping calculation per page load, for the contents in the cart plus the item being viewed. And NPC or not, I don't think that would be prohibitively computationally expensive in most cases. After all, people don't typically order thousands of different products, that might ship from any of hundreds of different warehouses, in a single online order. If it made someone more likely to click the "Add to Cart" button on a given item, it might be worth it. And you could have some threshold (number of different products on the order, for example) above which the marginal shipping cost is not calculated and displayed.
I think y'all are proving the appeal of "free shipping". Retailers provide convenience, and people expect that figuring out the nooks and crannies of shipping costs is part of the service.
If it were about cost and not convenience, Jet's algorithms would've beaten out Amazon.
Displaying it as "If you add this item to your current order, it would increase the order's shipping cost by an estimated $0.00" ought to allay any such confusion.
I think you're missing the point. The use case where I would want to see the shipping cost up-front is that I'm buying a single item and I don't care who I buy it from -- I'm browsing across a number of stores and will pick the one that gives me the best price (with the least hassle). In this case (purchasing a single item), there is never going to be a B -- I just want to know as easily as possible what it will cost to buy and ship this single product.
If I need to register in order to find that out, forget it. I'm browsing across multiple stores that I've possibly never visited before and never will again, I'm not going to register to all of them. If I need to add to the cart, you're pushing it. If somebody else can tell me upfront, they're ahead and more likely to win my business.
Based on only my own usage, if I haven't registered to a site I'm obviously not a regular buyer there and am most likely there to just buy a single item.
I imagine this could slow down the page noticeably, if you have to hit the shipper's api for every product.
EDIT: sibling comment pointed out, the origin warehouse may be unknown until you have the full order. so now you're figuring out which warehouse you'd hypothetically ship from if the customer bought each product on the page.
I wear these types of shirts under other shirts, and I think they're priced correctly for basically being underwear, but I would be very surprised to find a $2 t-shirt that's good for more than that.
In order to estimate shipping, you need the weight and dimensions of a product to ship, an origin, and a destination. They already know the origin, they need the other two from you.
We charge one rate for shipping internationally, and one for shipping domestically. The charge is for the minimum shipping cost we have. We don't recover the full cost of shipping, but it's good enough for us.
We don't recover the full cost of shipping, but it's good enough for us.
You mean directly? Or are you subsidizing purchases for some business building purpose??
(I'm being picky, but look at the headline and article here. They make the incredibly sophisticated point that businesses have to cover their costs somehow if they want to stay in business)
Yes, directly. The site we run had free shipping at first.
But for our given store, for the vast majority of our orders, the shipping costs come out the same. And from my experience, there's a huge difference in customer behavior between free and flat shipping.
So, it really depends upon which part of the article you want to talk about. Brick & mortar vs internet stores? Well, the cost of shipping that isn't paid by the customer is very small for our site. At our current sales volume, it would probably be less than the cost of renting commercial space.
For a well capitalized company that can afford to take well-researched risks, you're absolutely right. But shipping costs for some retailers can be $1 at the first percentile and >$100 as low as the 80th percentile. Any shipping pricing strategy that is purely policy or rule based has to have a very well analyzed foundation to it, or you risk wiping out your profitability with even a handful of poorly predicted purchases. Smaller retailers have a hard enough time pricing their products, let alone pricing their products under consideration of all of the possible shipping costs they could possibly face. So in the end they just defer on shipping price by passing it off to the customer.
I care where the warehouse is located in a lot of cases. If something ships from a location near me I know I'm getting it within a day. If something ships from the east coast it's going to be a while unless it's via air.
Well yeah, but if the warehouse is on the other side of the country there's a higher chance for delays, especially winter time where bad weather can shut down airports and truck routes.
I know I'm in the minority though. End of the day, as long as the item is delivered by the time they promise it doesn't ultimately matter I guess.
There are flat rate shipping services in addition to the other options. Anything that fits in a padded flat rate envelope will ship for $6.10 anywhere in the US. There is no simple shipping answer that covers a variety of goods and makes everyone happy.
If they have a functional inventory system, they know the weight and dimensions of the product, and all that's needed for destination is a box for postal code.
Believe it or not, the origin is in question as well. Until the complete order is known, we can't make an optimal choice of which warehouse to ship from. We might want to get it to you faster by fulfilling it from the nearest warehouse, but if one of your products isn't in stock there, we may need to change strategy, selecting a different warehouse. That may not be the customer's problem directly, but if we try to hide it, then the difference is going to surface in the seller's expenses, and thus in the price.
This is true. I actually worked with the "service" at Amazon that made these decisions. For a company with a single warehouse, or even multiple warehouses with equivalent inventory selections, you shouldn't face this problem. But with Amazon, where the entire inventory selection couldn't even fit in 20 warehouses, you end up with a terrible NP complete problem whose solution quality can make or break profitability on pretty much any product with less than a 10% gross margin. And I say "service" because you can't really fit into a service oriented architecture when you have solve times in excess of 5 minutes...the "service" is really just a way of dumping problems onto a queue to be passed downstream when done.
Sometimes a postal code is enough, sometimes it will be rejected by carrier APIs, especially in less dense areas like Alaska, where a postal code can span thousands of square miles. Lower 48 should be fine for the most part outside of the Rockies and some parts of the Midwest, but it isn't always obvious to determine. Plus, you get different costs when shipping to business or residential, or single address vs building with multiple addresses, etc.
And weight/dimensions can be determined from a single item but they do not add up linearly with multiple items. Once you've got a 5kg item, adding another may add 5% to the shipping cost. Adding an additional 50g item may add 0%. If it has to ship via air, it could add 5% for a small item, or 500% if it is a large item, independent of weight. Since the first item in your cart typically bears the brunt of the share of shipping cost, they tend to ask for your full cart before estimating shipping, because extrapolating from the first item alone could paint a very misleading picture of how much shipping will cost for multiple items.
There are solutions out there to help with pricing transparency, but they aren't as trivial as you make them out to be and I wouldn't expect a small eCommerce company to know how to do anything outside of directly communicating with carrier APIs.
As long as you present it as an estimation you're fine. The 12 people that you piss off are used to getting screwed and often have alternate arrangements (like a UPS Store box in the nearest big town)
I used to sell recently discontinued stuff in college (mostly Sun and Apple Powerbooks) on eBay, and most of my business was to places where mainstream vendors couldn't or wouldn't ship.
Estimates are not okay, at least in non B2B scenarios if you have a competent lawyer advising you. At a consumer level (where you have to make very serious assumptions about the customer's level of understanding of what an estimate is), you open yourself up to bait and switch claims.
Exacerbating the problem is that there is a huge variability in shipping prices. The parameter space is huge: residential vs business, single-family home vs multi-family building, location relative to shipping/sorting hubs, incidental delivery density (number of unrelated deliveries near you), handling concerns, signature requirements, size/weight X potential lane shipping options (weight dominates costs in ground lane shipping, physical dimensions dominate costs in air shipping). A 50 lb minifridge delivered to a multi-family residential building with a mail room in the same city as the origin warehouse may cost a carrier $1 to deliver. But if it is delivered to rural wyoming it may cost $40 and if it travels via air shipping you can tack on an additional $100. Estimates formed via simplistic assumptions may end up being inaccurate with standard deviations in excess of 100%. At the level of sophistication of the average customer, giving an estimate of $20 when actual costs are $100 screams bait and switch, whereas an estimate of $100 when actual costs are $20 means that the customer never makes it to checkout. If you aren't within a reasonable ~5% of actual, you can't reasonably provide estimates to the customer.
There is a push by carrier customers to provide estimated estimate accuracy for this reason (businesses want to know how accurate an estimate is if they have incomplete information), but ironically that ends up putting the carriers in the same position: data-validated claims about positive/negative bias in estimate accuracy can basically be considered bait and switch in court, even for large B2B customers with very detailed contracts.
The scope of the thread that I was referring to was "small ecommerce companies".
Small companies, depending on your vision of small, are usually pushing this complexity to the carrier via a shipping cost premium or outsourcing fulfillment altogether. I agree that in a B2B scenario, you need to meet whatever standard the contract lays out.
If estimates are not okay and the true cost of shipping cannot be calculated in a short period of time, then why is it okay to display a shipping price during the checkout process right before I click "submit", since this price is presumably an estimate? If presenting an estimate during the checkout process is actually okay, why not display it in the cart before the checkout process?
Getting a shipping estimate doesn't take a lot of time (a few hundred milliseconds at most), and by the time you are in checkout, you should have detailed enough product and destination information to get an extremely accurate estimate from the carrier APIs (which would only change in the event of the vendor misjudging item size or weight or something similar).
You have strong points there, and it is indeed difficult or impossible for small eCommerce companies to do the calculations themselves. That being said, how much do carriers charge clients for API calls? Unless it's a ridiculous amount, if I have a complete cart, I should be able to enter the same info used for actual shipping to do a cost calculation without having to sign up for an account or actually start the checkout process.
I'm not 100% sure about API pricing, but I would imagine they are free to make for businesses that actually ship things. It seems like one of those things you shouldn't skimp on as a carrier.
And yes they should at least offer a no-signup in-cart shipping estimate. Most off the shelf eccommerce sites do. If not, they definitely want to spam your inbox with "come back, we miss you!" messages :)
On the plus side, if you do care about the purchase enough to give them an Email at that point you can probably abandon the cart and get a discount. :)
In those cases where a postal code isn't enough, it seems like the failure case is the status quo. So those people will still have to go through the whole process to get an estimate, but most people won't. Isn't that strictly better?
Zones for shipping costs and time estimates are pretty large, so they could even give rough estimates until you input the exact address. Sales tax can differ from street to street, but even that could probably be guessed to within 1% based on your browser's location.
When I lived in eastern Idaho, geolocation APIs regularly placed my location in Boise, over 300 miles away. They work fine for people in larger cities, but aren't precise outside of that.
Yeah, I live in NJ, but I work at a federal facility with an IP that geolocation places in DC. So I frequently see sites assuming I'm in DC when I access them from work rather than home, even though the two locations are actually three miles apart.
So I certainly prefer when they just ask for a ZIP code.
>, and all that's needed for destination is a box for postal code.
There can also be differences of shipping costs for delivering to a business vs a residential address. I've seen shipping costs go up by $3+ when shipping to a buyer's home address instead of his office. The zipcode isn't granular enough to differentiate that.
I believe 2 factors contribute to the extra costs: 1) UPS trucks don't drive the residential streets as often as the main roadways where all the businesses are located and 2) many failed deliveries and repeated attempts because recipient isn't at home -- which costs more in gas, driver hours, etc
In that case, add a business/home selector or checkbox to the form. It's not that complicated. After all, if the information that I enter when I actually buy the item is precise enough to price the shipping, why can't I enter the exact same info without going through all the cart & registration BS?
Calculate Shipping [enter zip here] [enter country here] [select shipping option here]
Is this on the product or cart page or both? Do we assume we can use these details to pre-populate the actual shipping form later?
Though I agree that your simple example can work in certain limited circumstances and is something I would love to see on most sites I visit, shipping is one of those things that gets very complicated very quickly.
Edit:
Come to think of it. A simple and persistent form displayed on each page that I could fill in at the start of a shopping session that allowed the shipping cost to be displayed alongside the current cart total at all times would be pretty useful. I don't think I've actually seen an example of that.
1) Add the item to the cart
2) Create an account
3) Enter all my personal info
If your business makes it that much of a hassle to find out what shipping costs (presumably in order to capture sales), I'm indisposed to patronizing it. Transparency and lack of hassle are what I'm after, not free shipping.