3 ms·

What's your point?

• newnewpdro 8y ago
  That your generalization does not generally apply, especially in an era of extremely miniaturized popular goods. Consolidating the S&H into the item cost makes sense for a subset of situations sure, but there's a huge set where it's exploitive. Amazon orders for example often can amortize S&H costs by shipping a single package containing multiple items sharing a common origin. I'd argue that's true for a huge portion of Amazon orders. It's simply not a good generalization.
  • theli0nheart 8y ago
    I disagree that it's exploitative. It's simply easier. Recalculating shipping costs on a combinatatorial basis has a nonzero cost from a programming and operations POV. Having a fixed per-item shipping costs lowers overhead drastically, especially for smaller sellers. Large sellers obviously have different customers and I doubt they get away with just multiplying PER_ITEM_SHIPPING_COST X NUMBER_OF_ITEMS (I didn't think that was the focus on the OP though). I also disagree that it does not generally apply. Given two items, A & B, you might have the following total: A_shipping + A_price = A_total B_shipping + B_price = B_total What you're saying is that: AB_shipping + A_price + B_price < A_total + B_total But what I'm saying is that: A_shipping < AB_shipping B_shipping < AB_shipping In other words, no matter what, shipping more items does cost more than shipping less items. So it makes sense to charge more for it. How much more is a matter of economics.