On Shipping

I love the words “shipping included”. It makes buying physical products online so much more enjoyable. No need to think about “Where is this being shipped from?” or “How much extra is it gonna cost me?” And it’s not something that only the big players like Amazon can do, you can run a small shop and still follow this practice. From the start I decided I wanted to include shipping in the price for our little experiment.

We’ve been contacting a few shipping companies (UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc) and we’ve basically found out two things that apply to all of them. One, they usually focus on 1 to 2 day shipping. I wanted to include free 1 or 2-week shipping (which is cheaper) and then maybe offer the option of paying extra for 2-3 day shipping. The second thing we’ve found, though, is that they’re freakingly expensive, even for a lightweight product like ours. The very cheapest option is something like $30 to ship an envelope, unless you have some really serious volume, in which case it goes up down to maybe $15. I guess this pricing makes sense for more expensive items or very sensitive documents that need to be shipped fast, but not in our case, when it costs as much to ship (or even a lot more, depending on the destination) than the actual price of the product being shipped.

Still, being impatient as I am, I appreciate having the option of fast shipping (as outrageous as the price may be). If I found this particular product, wanted to buy it as a gift and didn’t have 1 or 2 weeks before my deadline (say, a birthday), I would totally pay $20 or $30 extra for faster shipping. Heck, I’ve done that before and I didn’t even have a deadline to meet. So yeah, if I can easily integrate (technically speaking) “pay extra for faster shipping”, I will.

My name is Manuel and I'm an entrepreneur from Barcelona, Spain. I run SwingLiving and I write here about online businesses, productivity, personal development and more. I hope you enjoy it.
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