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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 char

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.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      > Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case. It can come close. Most US carriers (or at least most of the bigger ones) offer a USPS hybrid service (e.g. UPS SurePost, FedEx SmartPost, etc.) that delegates to USPS for the last-mile delivery/dropoff. Unsurprisingly, these services tend to be cheaper than standard "ground" services, since USPS is already driving mail trucks to every mailbox (or at the very least every neighborhood) so their costs are more constant (not entirely constant, since a package takes up more space on the truck than the usual junk mail, but more constant than UPS or FedEx having to drive a truck for a one-off delivery). But yeah, absolutely brand-new startups will have higher costs. Those go down pretty quick, though, and it might even be okay to take the loss on those initial customers (and assign it to "marketing" or "customer acquisition" or however else you wanna record that in the books).

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.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    > Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case. It can come close. Most US carriers (or at least most of the bigger ones) offer a USPS hybrid service (e.g. UPS SurePost, FedEx SmartPost, etc.) that delegates to USPS for the last-mile delivery/dropoff. Unsurprisingly, these services tend to be cheaper than standard "ground" services, since USPS is already driving mail trucks to every mailbox (or at the very least every neighborhood) so their costs are more constant (not entirely constant, since a package takes up more space on the truck than the usual junk mail, but more constant than UPS or FedEx having to drive a truck for a one-off delivery). But yeah, absolutely brand-new startups will have higher costs. Those go down pretty quick, though, and it might even be okay to take the loss on those initial customers (and assign it to "marketing" or "customer acquisition" or however else you wanna record that in the books).