7 ms·

That’s one of the first thing I look for on an website: the shipping policy and amount. If it’s not present (or too well hidden) I usually try another website.

That’s one of the first thing I look for on an website: the shipping policy and amount. If it’s not present (or too well hidden) I usually try another website. I too hate the unpleasant surprise of high shipping costs

Cerium 7y ago
My number one complaint of shopify is that they require email first to see shipping, which means I'll get a "what's wrong? Forgot your cart?" Email later that day.
- pwodhouse 7y ago
  Take the opportunity to tell them what's wrong: that you want shipping costs up front. Then create a spam filter for the site and be happy to stuck a blow for justice that may help customers in future.
- _jal 7y ago
  You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. The next question I always get is about how annoying it is to go make an email address in the middle of checking out is. I personally always have a shell open - I'm a command line person. So I just run a script, `nem spammystore-com190621`, done. (And then `dem spammystorewhatever` when they start annoying me.) I've fantasized about writing a browser plugin that scans the page for entered email addresses and shells out to create them on submit, but (a) I'm not even sure that's entirely possible anymore, and (b) wiring my browser up to something that runs sudo on remote machines seems like maybe not the best idea I've ever had.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    It’s possible with native messaging. You write a content script that injects some JavaScript to check the page that then messages with background page that then messages an external application. Though I likely would make it a page action or a context menu action. I think if you’re on OS X that it would be easier to write a small automater action that you register as a service that after you select some text and right click it it parses the text and calls the shell command.
  - RexM 7y ago
    I have a catch-all inbox on my domain so there's no setup. I can just enter <whatever_i_want>@example.com and I'll get the email in the catch-all inbox.
    - _jal 7y ago
      I did that for a while, but stopped probably a decade ago. A spam robot educated me about my mistake when it sent me many, many gigs of crap, using a dictionary of some sort to guess usernames. Surprise! they all "worked".
      - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        No need for the dictionary: I regularly get spam to addresses that are just random sequences of letters.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    You could create a SUID executable on your remote machine that gets addresses from an unprivileged account and creates the mailboxes, or a daemon that gets them from the network. But I guess the easiest way would be to throw all the email into a catch-all inbox and filter it by mailbox. Anyway, I've stopped doing that after I got locked out of a store because I couldn't remember the address I registered, and it would neither let me reset my password without I entering my email or create a new account with the same data of one that already existed. Luckily this one a shitty store so getting locked out was a gain, but the odds of this happening to something important are not low.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I used to use a different email address for placing orders, requesting info, etc. and then I'd just check that inbox when I was looking for something or just wanted to skim to look for deals, etc. However, as tends to happen with filtering, I basically just stopped looking. And I didn't really mean all of this mail to go to dev/null. These days I tend to find that Google tabs work well enough that I don't really get overwhelmed by all the email going to the Promotions tab.
  - amelius 7y ago
    > You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. I'd be surprised if there isn't a service for that.
    - arantius 7y ago
      There's tons. https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/
slfnflctd 7y ago
This happened to me on Mother's Day. They already had me, I was committed, and then they tacked on $25 shipping (this is not a heavy item) in two separate charges for some reason. I abandoned and got almost the exact same item cheaper on Amazon with free shipping. All they had to do was not be greedy-- I probably would have paid up to $10 for shipping even knowing it was inflated, even knowing I could probably find the item cheaper, just to get it over with. If you can't land that kind of sale you're doing something wrong. Of course, maybe I'm the idiot and they're making bank by ripping people off, but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with a place like that.
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  > All they had to do was not be greedy-- I think you meant "all they had to do was use enormous volumes to benefit from being a logistical priority and huge economies of scale in their shipping process."
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    I work for a smaller e-commerce company\* (specifically with the fulfillment centers, so very much in tune with shipping/logistics). $25 would make sense for an individual shipping one-off boxes (and - in the US - not doing the smart thing and using USPS flat rate boxes), but (assuming a reasonably-sized box and ground service) that's exorbitant for any company shipping out even tens of boxes a day (let alone hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands). Without further context (or an exact weight, or whether they were gonna use an expedited or overnight service) it's hard to say how cheap they could go, but $25 seems too high. Either the seller is really small scale or they need to renegotiate their rates. ---- \* We're big enough to have a bit of negotiating power, especially with smaller/regional carriers, but we're nowhere near Amazon-scale.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      Every e-commerce startup starts with their first 5 orders to their first 5 customers, and has to either make a loss on all those initial customers, or charge exorbitant shipping. In my view, there are 3 bits of effort for shipping:. Pickup, transit/routing, and dropoff. Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case. Pickup and dropoff should cost the same. That means, in the worst case, a small e-commerce seller sending only 1 item per day could expect to pay double, since they pay the pickup and dropoff price with no volume discount. Prices for delivery services don't reflect that though, suggesting market inefficiency.
ryandrake 7y ago
I wish companies would just raise prices a little and eat the shipping costs themselves. Don’t make me worry about it. Advertised price should be as-shipped. Y’all are competing with Amazon’s free slow shipping and eBay where a huge amount (gotta be over 80%) of sellers offer free shipping.
- magduf 7y ago
  There's some problems with this: 1) What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon. 2) What if they're in another country? Even Amazon doesn't do free, slow shipping to other countries from their US site, nor do any Ebay sellers. 3) If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller. Shipping in the US has gotten pretty expensive lately, if you're not Amazon. If they order multiple items, it's much more economical, but you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item, so you're not competitive with other sellers who do combined shipping.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    > What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon. People absolutely expect to pay for fast shipping; people just expect baseline slow shipping to be free. > What if they're in another country? Depends on the industry you're in, but it seems a lot less reasonable to expect free international shipping, unless you're buying something that costs high-three-figures or four-figures. > If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller. USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping. > you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping. Actually, they really aren't, not for private shippers. If your item is tiny, you can ship it for around $3 by 1st class; if it's over 1 pound, it's not going to be cheap. For something that only costs $5-10, that's very significant. >You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point. People look at initial price first, and won't see your discount until later. The competitor with a cheaper per-item price will get the sale.

Cerium 7y ago

My number one complaint of shopify is that they require email first to see shipping, which means I'll get a "what's wrong? Forgot your cart?" Email later that day.

pwodhouse 7y ago
Take the opportunity to tell them what's wrong: that you want shipping costs up front. Then create a spam filter for the site and be happy to stuck a blow for justice that may help customers in future.
_jal 7y ago
You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. The next question I always get is about how annoying it is to go make an email address in the middle of checking out is. I personally always have a shell open - I'm a command line person. So I just run a script, `nem spammystore-com190621`, done. (And then `dem spammystorewhatever` when they start annoying me.) I've fantasized about writing a browser plugin that scans the page for entered email addresses and shells out to create them on submit, but (a) I'm not even sure that's entirely possible anymore, and (b) wiring my browser up to something that runs sudo on remote machines seems like maybe not the best idea I've ever had.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  It’s possible with native messaging. You write a content script that injects some JavaScript to check the page that then messages with background page that then messages an external application. Though I likely would make it a page action or a context menu action. I think if you’re on OS X that it would be easier to write a small automater action that you register as a service that after you select some text and right click it it parses the text and calls the shell command.
- RexM 7y ago
  I have a catch-all inbox on my domain so there's no setup. I can just enter <whatever_i_want>@example.com and I'll get the email in the catch-all inbox.
  - _jal 7y ago
    I did that for a while, but stopped probably a decade ago. A spam robot educated me about my mistake when it sent me many, many gigs of crap, using a dictionary of some sort to guess usernames. Surprise! they all "worked".
    - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
      No need for the dictionary: I regularly get spam to addresses that are just random sequences of letters.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  You could create a SUID executable on your remote machine that gets addresses from an unprivileged account and creates the mailboxes, or a daemon that gets them from the network. But I guess the easiest way would be to throw all the email into a catch-all inbox and filter it by mailbox. Anyway, I've stopped doing that after I got locked out of a store because I couldn't remember the address I registered, and it would neither let me reset my password without I entering my email or create a new account with the same data of one that already existed. Luckily this one a shitty store so getting locked out was a gain, but the odds of this happening to something important are not low.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I used to use a different email address for placing orders, requesting info, etc. and then I'd just check that inbox when I was looking for something or just wanted to skim to look for deals, etc. However, as tends to happen with filtering, I basically just stopped looking. And I didn't really mean all of this mail to go to dev/null. These days I tend to find that Google tabs work well enough that I don't really get overwhelmed by all the email going to the Promotions tab.
- amelius 7y ago
  > You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. I'd be surprised if there isn't a service for that.
  - arantius 7y ago
    There's tons. https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/

slfnflctd 7y ago

This happened to me on Mother's Day. They already had me, I was committed, and then they tacked on $25 shipping (this is not a heavy item) in two separate charges for some reason. I abandoned and got almost the exact same item cheaper on Amazon with free shipping. All they had to do was not be greedy-- I probably would have paid up to $10 for shipping even knowing it was inflated, even knowing I could probably find the item cheaper, just to get it over with. If you can't land that kind of sale you're doing something wrong. Of course, maybe I'm the idiot and they're making bank by ripping people off, but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with a place like that.

InitialLastName 7y ago
> All they had to do was not be greedy-- I think you meant "all they had to do was use enormous volumes to benefit from being a logistical priority and huge economies of scale in their shipping process."
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I work for a smaller e-commerce company\* (specifically with the fulfillment centers, so very much in tune with shipping/logistics). $25 would make sense for an individual shipping one-off boxes (and - in the US - not doing the smart thing and using USPS flat rate boxes), but (assuming a reasonably-sized box and ground service) that's exorbitant for any company shipping out even tens of boxes a day (let alone hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands). Without further context (or an exact weight, or whether they were gonna use an expedited or overnight service) it's hard to say how cheap they could go, but $25 seems too high. Either the seller is really small scale or they need to renegotiate their rates. ---- \* We're big enough to have a bit of negotiating power, especially with smaller/regional carriers, but we're nowhere near Amazon-scale.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Every e-commerce startup starts with their first 5 orders to their first 5 customers, and has to either make a loss on all those initial customers, or charge exorbitant shipping. In my view, there are 3 bits of effort for shipping:. Pickup, transit/routing, and dropoff. Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case. Pickup and dropoff should cost the same. That means, in the worst case, a small e-commerce seller sending only 1 item per day could expect to pay double, since they pay the pickup and dropoff price with no volume discount. Prices for delivery services don't reflect that though, suggesting market inefficiency.

ryandrake 7y ago

I wish companies would just raise prices a little and eat the shipping costs themselves. Don’t make me worry about it. Advertised price should be as-shipped. Y’all are competing with Amazon’s free slow shipping and eBay where a huge amount (gotta be over 80%) of sellers offer free shipping.

magduf 7y ago
There's some problems with this: 1) What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon. 2) What if they're in another country? Even Amazon doesn't do free, slow shipping to other countries from their US site, nor do any Ebay sellers. 3) If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller. Shipping in the US has gotten pretty expensive lately, if you're not Amazon. If they order multiple items, it's much more economical, but you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item, so you're not competitive with other sellers who do combined shipping.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  > What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon. People absolutely expect to pay for fast shipping; people just expect baseline slow shipping to be free. > What if they're in another country? Depends on the industry you're in, but it seems a lot less reasonable to expect free international shipping, unless you're buying something that costs high-three-figures or four-figures. > If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller. USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping. > you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping. Actually, they really aren't, not for private shippers. If your item is tiny, you can ship it for around $3 by 1st class; if it's over 1 pound, it's not going to be cheap. For something that only costs $5-10, that's very significant. >You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point. People look at initial price first, and won't see your discount until later. The competitor with a cheaper per-item price will get the sale.