5 ms·

Not all shipping charges can be calculated ahead of time. For example, you may offer free shipping on orders over $50. You may charge $9.99 for the first item,

Not all shipping charges can be calculated ahead of time. For example, you may offer free shipping on orders over $50. You may charge $9.99 for the first item, $5.99 for each additional item. You may charge by weight of the whole order. You may have oversized items or packages that can be combined to reduce shipping charges. Some items may ship together as OTR Freight, while others can go via the local postal service. Buying multiple items changes this calculation. So, yes, you can estimate shipping for a single item but you can't always present the per-item shipping charge as it depends on the context of the whole order.

jasonv 6y ago
What this poster said. Yes, a lot of smaller e-commerce platforms could do this, but finalizing order value can be a very complex workflow for bigger merchants with more varied sku mixes. I’ve worked in multi-billion dollar Ecom companies where the programs to refine the order checkout process gets scoped as a multi year effort accounting for a couple of decades of legacy cruft... even if you separate the “product/tax/shipping” calculations from the “customer/credit/rewards” dependencies. But it’s often not worth separating them because they’re very inter-dependent. Moreso when you involve drop shipping or made-to-order things.
clairity 6y ago
that's true that the calculations can get complicated pretty quickly in ecommerce, but google probably has all the data it needs (origin zip, destination zip, likely carrier(s), possibly even the weight/size of each item) to provide a pretty good estimate in most cases. they could even calculate a range for [1 item per box, all items in 1 box]. the important bit is to present it as a separate line item (with grand total) so that consumers can decide how much to trust the estimate. that would be an even clearer shot across the bow of amazon, walmart, and the like, who provide comparison across their own platform merchants, but not across all merchants everywhere.
- gwright 6y ago
  Google guessing seems like a terrible idea. That will just confuse the consumer when they go to purchase and find a different value, possibly creating a customer service problem for the vendor through no fault of their own.
bluntfang 6y ago
Well we can change this by including shipping as the total price and not give deals on shipping. Deals on shipping are dark patterns.
- innocenat 6y ago
  I don't understand. So if the item is $5 and shipping is $5 regardless of the number of items being bought, then if I bought 2 I should pay $20 instead of $15?
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    What don't you understand about deals on shipping being dark patterns?
    - innocenat 6y ago
      It seems that you are saying that properly charging for shipping to be a dark patterns? Or you mean different kind of deal? Can you elaborate? As far as I know, the shipping charge doesn't scale linearly with number of items, so to me including shipping within the items price is going to overcharge the customer.
chrisan 6y ago
How does that change by having the bot add items to the cart? You haven't solved anything You are still left with the same scenario as if the store listed the individual shipping price on the front page Google isn't going to know what other items you _might_ add to show you a "real" shipping cost
- saltedonion 6y ago
  It matter because if you purchase multiple things your average shipping cost per item changes. If you only calculate shipping based on first item shipping cost it will be inaccurate.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    But Google is only showing a result for a single item.
- Xelbair 6y ago
  And what's even more interesting - human would do exactly the same thing. Add items to card, check the total price and then decide whether to buy it(i remember trying to order some stuff form one japanese plamo store - and it didn't provide exact prices before checkout. I went through the process, but even the cheapest option for delivery was way too high - as 2x price of the whole order)
  - LorenPechtel 6y ago
    I've had that sort of experience with a Japanese store once--the prices were good but the shipping (the only thing they offered was international FedEx) killed it. The US is just as bad--we don't have slow international options.
- hrktb 6y ago
  I’d assume parent’s point is regarding the “which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process.” part. There’s a lot of legitimate case were showing shipping price upfront is just not doable or valuable to the customer. BTW there are a surprising amount of shops for specialized goods that won’t even list the final price at the end. The customer places an order, and they update it with a finalized price after a human looks at the content, and from there the customer is free to pay the transaction or give up the order.
dheera 6y ago
You could GeoIP the user's IP address and display an initial tax + shipping estimate.
- nickip 6y ago
  Tax isn't always only region based. You also need to account for Vat Tax which has a bunch of conditions around it too that you can't assume.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Include the statistical average tax in the price, and then up it or down it slightly at check out like a tax return. The user will be happy that the advertised price is a good estimate of the final price. Same for shipping.
bhuber 6y ago
Even assuming you already know the customer's shipping address and ignore the multiple-items problem, this is still difficult to accomplish from a computational complexity perspective. Calculating shipping cost is likely at least an order of magnitude more expensive than simply looking up list prices in a database - you have to look up the customer's address, go through a bunch of tax rules, figure out the shipping cost (however that works, I honestly don't know but I assume it's non-trivial), etc. Now consider the fact that prices displayed at checkout make up a tiny fraction of prices that are requested by the site. Every time an item appears anywhere on the site you probably want to display a price with it. So now your infrastructure costs for handling pricing requests go up by an order of magnitude since all of them no require expensive pricing computation, whereas only a tiny fraction did before. On top of all this, if all you're displaying is list price you can cache that very effectively and significantly reduce the load on your backend, probably by at least another order of magnitude. As with many things, items loaded on ecommerce sites tend to follow a Pareto distribution, for which caching is very effective. Adding a shipping address to the mix will destroy this caching ability, so not only are your requests 10x more expensive, 10x more of them now make it to the backend. There are various tricks you can do to try to have your cake and eat it too, but none of them are easy or simple. At the end of the day, while this is definitely a useful and desirable feature for customers, it has significant cost for both development time and hardware. TL;DR this is actually a much more difficult technical problem to solve cost effectively at scale than it initially appears.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  In many cases, this is not only computationally expensive on the server, it also requires one or more requests to external APIs which further slows things down. Imagine needing to query the API of your tax vendor, then also your shipping provider of choice for every single item displayed on a page. Even if you did this client side, asynchronously, it would be a lot of extra requests for something that most shoppers won't even pay attention to. I ran an ecommerce platform company for many years and you had merchants with very complex shipping and tax schemes, or you had merchants that made it super simple with a basic rate table. The complex merchants had margin on every order at the cost of processing external API calls. The simple rate table merchants had great margin on some, lost money on others but were happy with their average shipping margin.
three_seagrass 6y ago
Is Google indexing the shipping cost? I don't see how this is relevant because ecommerce sites will change the price in the cart (or reveal it) before shipping is even calculated.
abiogenesis 6y ago
True, but you can at least show the total shipping cost for the shopping cart, given a zip code or a similar indication, without completing the whole account creation/checkout process.

jasonv 6y ago

What this poster said. Yes, a lot of smaller e-commerce platforms could do this, but finalizing order value can be a very complex workflow for bigger merchants with more varied sku mixes. I’ve worked in multi-billion dollar Ecom companies where the programs to refine the order checkout process gets scoped as a multi year effort accounting for a couple of decades of legacy cruft... even if you separate the “product/tax/shipping” calculations from the “customer/credit/rewards” dependencies. But it’s often not worth separating them because they’re very inter-dependent. Moreso when you involve drop shipping or made-to-order things.

clairity 6y ago

that's true that the calculations can get complicated pretty quickly in ecommerce, but google probably has all the data it needs (origin zip, destination zip, likely carrier(s), possibly even the weight/size of each item) to provide a pretty good estimate in most cases. they could even calculate a range for [1 item per box, all items in 1 box]. the important bit is to present it as a separate line item (with grand total) so that consumers can decide how much to trust the estimate. that would be an even clearer shot across the bow of amazon, walmart, and the like, who provide comparison across their own platform merchants, but not across all merchants everywhere.

gwright 6y ago
Google guessing seems like a terrible idea. That will just confuse the consumer when they go to purchase and find a different value, possibly creating a customer service problem for the vendor through no fault of their own.

bluntfang 6y ago

Well we can change this by including shipping as the total price and not give deals on shipping. Deals on shipping are dark patterns.

innocenat 6y ago
I don't understand. So if the item is $5 and shipping is $5 regardless of the number of items being bought, then if I bought 2 I should pay $20 instead of $15?
- bluntfang 6y ago
  What don't you understand about deals on shipping being dark patterns?
  - innocenat 6y ago
    It seems that you are saying that properly charging for shipping to be a dark patterns? Or you mean different kind of deal? Can you elaborate? As far as I know, the shipping charge doesn't scale linearly with number of items, so to me including shipping within the items price is going to overcharge the customer.

chrisan 6y ago

How does that change by having the bot add items to the cart? You haven't solved anything You are still left with the same scenario as if the store listed the individual shipping price on the front page Google isn't going to know what other items you _might_ add to show you a "real" shipping cost

saltedonion 6y ago
It matter because if you purchase multiple things your average shipping cost per item changes. If you only calculate shipping based on first item shipping cost it will be inaccurate.
- mdoms 6y ago
  But Google is only showing a result for a single item.
Xelbair 6y ago
And what's even more interesting - human would do exactly the same thing. Add items to card, check the total price and then decide whether to buy it(i remember trying to order some stuff form one japanese plamo store - and it didn't provide exact prices before checkout. I went through the process, but even the cheapest option for delivery was way too high - as 2x price of the whole order)
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  I've had that sort of experience with a Japanese store once--the prices were good but the shipping (the only thing they offered was international FedEx) killed it. The US is just as bad--we don't have slow international options.
hrktb 6y ago
I’d assume parent’s point is regarding the “which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process.” part. There’s a lot of legitimate case were showing shipping price upfront is just not doable or valuable to the customer. BTW there are a surprising amount of shops for specialized goods that won’t even list the final price at the end. The customer places an order, and they update it with a finalized price after a human looks at the content, and from there the customer is free to pay the transaction or give up the order.

dheera 6y ago

You could GeoIP the user's IP address and display an initial tax + shipping estimate.

nickip 6y ago
Tax isn't always only region based. You also need to account for Vat Tax which has a bunch of conditions around it too that you can't assume.
- dheera 6y ago
  Include the statistical average tax in the price, and then up it or down it slightly at check out like a tax return. The user will be happy that the advertised price is a good estimate of the final price. Same for shipping.

bhuber 6y ago

Even assuming you already know the customer's shipping address and ignore the multiple-items problem, this is still difficult to accomplish from a computational complexity perspective. Calculating shipping cost is likely at least an order of magnitude more expensive than simply looking up list prices in a database - you have to look up the customer's address, go through a bunch of tax rules, figure out the shipping cost (however that works, I honestly don't know but I assume it's non-trivial), etc. Now consider the fact that prices displayed at checkout make up a tiny fraction of prices that are requested by the site. Every time an item appears anywhere on the site you probably want to display a price with it. So now your infrastructure costs for handling pricing requests go up by an order of magnitude since all of them no require expensive pricing computation, whereas only a tiny fraction did before. On top of all this, if all you're displaying is list price you can cache that very effectively and significantly reduce the load on your backend, probably by at least another order of magnitude. As with many things, items loaded on ecommerce sites tend to follow a Pareto distribution, for which caching is very effective. Adding a shipping address to the mix will destroy this caching ability, so not only are your requests 10x more expensive, 10x more of them now make it to the backend. There are various tricks you can do to try to have your cake and eat it too, but none of them are easy or simple. At the end of the day, while this is definitely a useful and desirable feature for customers, it has significant cost for both development time and hardware. TL;DR this is actually a much more difficult technical problem to solve cost effectively at scale than it initially appears.

mmcconnell1618 6y ago
In many cases, this is not only computationally expensive on the server, it also requires one or more requests to external APIs which further slows things down. Imagine needing to query the API of your tax vendor, then also your shipping provider of choice for every single item displayed on a page. Even if you did this client side, asynchronously, it would be a lot of extra requests for something that most shoppers won't even pay attention to. I ran an ecommerce platform company for many years and you had merchants with very complex shipping and tax schemes, or you had merchants that made it super simple with a basic rate table. The complex merchants had margin on every order at the cost of processing external API calls. The simple rate table merchants had great margin on some, lost money on others but were happy with their average shipping margin.

three_seagrass 6y ago

Is Google indexing the shipping cost? I don't see how this is relevant because ecommerce sites will change the price in the cart (or reveal it) before shipping is even calculated.

abiogenesis 6y ago

True, but you can at least show the total shipping cost for the shopping cart, given a zip code or a similar indication, without completing the whole account creation/checkout process.