Like many people, when the need arises to make a gift purchase, my default mode is to go online. Being squarely in the holiday season, I am constantly (not as much as the economy would like, sadly) engaging on etail sites, old and new, evaluating my experiences on each.
A practice that seems to be gaining momentum by many etailers that I find very disingenuous is around “shipping”- the additional cost we pay to have an item sent to us. Generally, this label –“shipping” – includes postage (fee by USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.), handling (etail warehouse staff’s time to actually get the product and process it), and materials (the cardboard box, shipping label, styrofoam popcorn, etc.). And to be clear, this is fine by me. I have no issue paying to have an item sent to me.
The practice I find counter to a quality customer experience is shipping based on item cost. In other words, the price to ship an item is driven solely by the cost of the item only, no other variables. Now, in my feeble thinking about what drives the cost of shipping, I generally think that the cost of postage is influenced by the following variables: weight, package dimensions, distance, and class. But for many etailers, this is not the case. Allow me to give an example.
I recently made two separate purchases on Levenger.com, a stationary and office supply company, which illustrates this phenomenon and placed it solidly in my mind as ridiculous. The first was for an incredibly small pen (the Walletini Pen) which I can keep in the wallet-sized notebook that I carry with me at all times. The second purchase, several weeks later, was for a specific type of desk pad paper which I use to storyboard presentations and discussions. These two items cost virtually the same amount: $32 and $31, respectively. And as such, the cost of shipping for both items was $7.
What I found odd was that these two items had such fundamentally different properties yet had the same $7 shipping cost. The pen, as you can see from the description and photo, is the length of a business card and weighs .37 ounces. That’s 2.3% of a single pound. The paper, on the other hand, is 11 inches by 17 inches and while it does not show the item’s weight, I found it to be more than 4 pounds. So despite each item’s weight and dimensions (and thus required packaging) being very different, suggesting that it costs more for Levenger to ship the larger, heavier item, I paid a flat rate for each- $7.
So why do etailers do this? Why not charge a flat rate for handling and materials and variable costs for postage depending on the item’s physical properties? I can only speculate that this mode of costing shipping works out to be more profitable for the etailer. And from a systems perspective, it is much easier to implement and manage. No need to factor in weight, distance, packaging, etc., - merely use a look-up table, find the item’s price, and add the appropriate fee. But despite these internally driven arguments (more money, easier to implement), this mode of shipping costing fails the reasonableness test based on my Levenger.com example above; same $7 fee yet wildly different properties on the two items. Who in their right mind would argue that the actual costs to Levenger.com are the exact same for the two items I purchased?
As for me, I am no longer shopping at etailers that have a flat-rate shipping policy. I prefer to have their profits and margins baked into the item price and not into the shipping price. Something about the clarity and openness resonates with me more.
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Flat-rate shipping tables from:
Victoria's Secret
Grandin Road