Posted by Rebecca on 9/30/2019 to
News
Free shipping is a thing that a lot of people like. It helps make it clear what the real cost of an item is. People hate it when shipping costs close to or near the cost of an item. It's a dilemma for those of us who sell really heavy and also cheap things such as button supplies. But shipping is not really free. And obviously, as a business, we cannot lose money. Rest assured that we do not make money on the shipping! We are a small company. We do not have the scale that Amazon has to be able to negotiate rock bottom prices. The prices you see on the website calculator are fed directly from the UPS and USPS calculators tied to our account. It gives you a real-time quote of what the courier charges us, to you, based on the weight of the items in your cart, your location, and the shipping method you selected. This is a better, more honest way to price shipping, so you can see what happens when you add or remove items in real time.
Free shipping won't help keep the costs down for you, the consumer, because what we would be forced to do is just increase the price on all our items to compensate for it. So we would have to factor in the cost of shipping to every item. It would completely negate the savings you would normally get from combining multiple items into the same order. Most of the orders we get are for more than one item. Most of our customers would end up paying more if we implemented a free shipping model. In addition, this is a deadline driven industry where many people choose to upgrade to faster shipping methods. Having a ground shipping price worked into the price of the item, and then adding an expedited fee on top of that also gouges the consumer.
Free shipping seems like a good idea on the surface, but we choose to continue to use the calculator method because we feel that it is more fair and honest.
I would love your feedback.