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Yeah that's true. But from a UX perspective there are ways to make this less opaque. Perhaps a call to action at the top of the listing with an entry box to ent

Yeah that's true. But from a UX perspective there are ways to make this less opaque. Perhaps a call to action at the top of the listing with an entry box to enter the Zip Code so an approximate final price can be calculated. Any good UX designer can come up with a solution for this in a couple of hours or less. There's just no motivation to make it happen because this obfuscation of data is particularly optimized and useful for the sellers.

neutronicus 6y ago
e-commerce sites seem to be asking for my location all the time anyways. If they're doing that anyways, they should have everything they need to hazard a pretty good guess (and then they have an actual inducement for me to provide it).
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  Agree!
TeMPOraL 6y ago
ZIP code box that doesn't oblige you to provide any more accurate data, and also without it, it should still be possible to display brackets. "Shipping: $6 - $24, [enter ZIP code for detailed quote]".
jeanvalmarc 6y ago
Amazon just lists it as a "subtotal," which I think is probably the best way to do it. I don't know about the "UX designer in a couple of hours" line: automatic shipping is a nightmarish bag of worms and isn't really a UX problem. What do you do if they order multiple SKU's that don't pack nicely into one box or are warehoused in different locations? Or if there is something weird about their shipping address? What do you use for box size and weight, and what approximation did you use for dunnage? You can approximate UPS/FedEX costs by fitting a trend line, they are decently modeled by a linear (base charge + K*distance) function, but when you go to buy the label you might be way off. This puts you in the lose-lose-lose of either eating the difference of wrong estimates, overcharging for shipping and losing conversions, or just making people hate you by increasing the shipping over the estimate. Making a shipping API call is noticeably slow, so most people require an interaction after the address is entered. Tim Sweeney's hot take was that "the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and shopping carts!"

neutronicus 6y ago

e-commerce sites seem to be asking for my location all the time anyways. If they're doing that anyways, they should have everything they need to hazard a pretty good guess (and then they have an actual inducement for me to provide it).

whoisjuan 6y ago
Agree!

TeMPOraL 6y ago

ZIP code box that doesn't oblige you to provide any more accurate data, and also without it, it should still be possible to display brackets. "Shipping: $6 - $24, [enter ZIP code for detailed quote]".

jeanvalmarc 6y ago

Amazon just lists it as a "subtotal," which I think is probably the best way to do it. I don't know about the "UX designer in a couple of hours" line: automatic shipping is a nightmarish bag of worms and isn't really a UX problem. What do you do if they order multiple SKU's that don't pack nicely into one box or are warehoused in different locations? Or if there is something weird about their shipping address? What do you use for box size and weight, and what approximation did you use for dunnage? You can approximate UPS/FedEX costs by fitting a trend line, they are decently modeled by a linear (base charge + K*distance) function, but when you go to buy the label you might be way off. This puts you in the lose-lose-lose of either eating the difference of wrong estimates, overcharging for shipping and losing conversions, or just making people hate you by increasing the shipping over the estimate. Making a shipping API call is noticeably slow, so most people require an interaction after the address is entered. Tim Sweeney's hot take was that "the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and shopping carts!"