This is late, but here’s my rant about shipping.
To start, I want to say that I don’t personally get what’s so terrible about price-inclusive shipping.
Sure, I get why it’s not quite right to call it “free” shipping. But I don’t know if that’s really fooling anyone. It’s not like I see “free shipping” and think, gee whiz, sure is nice of them to cover the cost for me. I just see it and think, okay cool, that’s one less fee to add before I figure out how much I really have to pay.
When there’s extra steps to find the final price, it’s less convenient. On Schiit’s website for instance, you have to add the product to the cart and then put in your zipcode to get the shipping rate, then do a bit of simple math. I know it’s not that bad but it’s an extra step.
I feel the same way about tax. Some websites give you the tax estimate in the cart when you put in your zipcode but others make you go almost all the way through the checkout process. Of course, you could just bust out a calculator and punch in the numbers yourself, but again, the point is that you have to do work to find the real price.
Taking Schiit as an example… when you go to a product page, Modi for instance, and see $99… no one can actually get a Modi for that price. You might be located outside of CA and therefore not have to pay tax on it depending on your state’s online ordering laws, but you’ll have to pay some amount of shipping. Alternatively, you might live close enough to pick up the product at the Schiitr and avoid paying for shipping, but then obviously you have to pay CA tax. Depending on where you live, you have to pay both. The only way to know for sure the exact price for what you want is to put everything in the cart and get through at least the shipping/billing address portion of checkout. Then it shows you the final price including any shipping or tax before you put in your credit card info.
Now, I’m definitely not calling Schiit dishonest in any way here. But I also wouldn’t go so far as to say they are more honest in this particular regard than most retailers; More transparent perhaps, because you can see exactly what portion of the price you are paying is for shipping.
Another aspect is that websites that offer “free” shipping are also somewhat socializing shipping costs. Shipping a particular product to different locations costs a different amount, but if you bake in the average cost and call it free, some people are overpaying and others are underpaying. From a purely personal standpoint, this doesn’t bother me. I can see why it would bother some people though. I just think that if everything was like this, sometimes you’d lose, sometimes you’d win, and it would end up being about the same throughout the course of your life. Now, I understand this is something relatively easy to do for a large corporation but not easy for a small company, so I would not hold that against those companies. As such, I’m perfectly happy with Schiit’s shipping practices. But I don’t dislike other companies who do it differently, namely by including “free shipping.”
I guess the “ideal” system would be something that shows you, as quickly and easily as possible, the final price of an item, including a breakdown of how much comes from tax and shipping. But doing that would require coding a more complicated website and showing higher prices to consumers. But that in my opinion would be more honest. (This is also further complicated by the fact that shipping costs change depending on how many items you order at once, but this post is already about 4x longer than it needs to be).
