Seth Godin’s post misses the point
"Repeat business is what matters, and that happens when you surprise people (for the better). Not when you rip them off."
While I don't disagree with the premise of the problem, Seth Godin's post yesterday completely missed the boat. After years of working with numerous clients and running our own physical goods store online, I honestly believe that there are very few merchants on the web who "have realized that you can make 100% of your profit from shipping and handling and do quite well."
The problem isn't with the merchants. It's with the shipping companies. FedEx, UPS, and even the postal service - just this year - have moved to dimensional weights for all of their shipments, whether ground or air. Residential delivery costs more. Rural delivery costs more. The charges from the carriers add up pretty quickly.
Add to that the difficulty of calculating shippings costs. How can a SMB owner accurately determine, for a given order, not only the weight, but the dimensions of the box that the order must ship in? And for MIVA, there's no software that has any sort of packing algorithm to do this, even if you did store the dimensions of every product in your website's database. It gets worse if you try to sell on Amazon. They don't even do real-time lookups of UPS or FedEx rates at all. The merchant just has to guess - a flat rate, a per-item rate, etc.
Seth, we love your work, but the problem of shipping goes much deeper than you seem to have realized.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:24 am
I worry that I was too brief in my post. My point wasn’t that shipping is a rip off (it usually isn’t) or that the shipping companies are easy to work with or fair to smbs (they’re not). My point was that for a long time, consumers accepted the fact that there’s a surcharge for shipping, but not for, say, mannikins or rent.
thanks for reading!
August 9th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Seth - on that we are agreed. Shipping is something that stands out in the world of overhead costs; as you said, no one accepts or has likely ever seen a charge for retail fixtures, rent, security systems, etc. And to take it a step further: even consumers who accept a separate shipping charge, definitely don’t like the idea of a separate handling charge (e.g. not rolled into “shipping and handling” together).
New standards are definitely being set; free shipping is no longer an exception…it’s fast becoming the norm.
Good points! Thanks, Susan