Shipping

[Monster]

i have sold a couple times on Ebay, so i know around the price of shipping. i look at websites and the shipping is cheap! how do you people afford to do this? this one site was going to send a 60 gallon fish tank for $7.99. now i KNOW it's alot more than that. maybe around the $20-$25, probably more.

how do you guys keep shipping so low?

[brian.mark]

We use a model of putting a certain percentage of the profit from the product back towards the freight charge. We ship a lot of items for a few bucks by doing it that way, especially more expensive items.

I'm still trying to figure out how some sites (a couple of our competitors) are selling below cost and offering free shipping on top of that. We've verified with our vendors that nobody can buy them for less than what we're paying, regardless of volume. Maybe they're just not looking to make money.

Some of our vendors do offer rebates which we have also applied towards shipping, but that depends on volume. We qualify for the max rebate percentage based upon our volume with most all of them.

The end story is that you've got to do what makes sense for your business. If you only make $2.00 on a product that costs $20 to ship, don't ship it for free. If you're making $50 on that product, you could offer free shipping and still come out ahead.

Brian.

[Marc Bowker]

I've struggled with shipping charges since I started my e-commerce site 15 months ago. I've tried rates based on order dollar amount, rates based on order weight and realtime shipping rates. The wild card for my business is multiple shipments within the same order. But I think that I've finally settled on using realtime shipping rates with a disclaimer that heavier items and and orders with multiple shipments may require additional shipping charges. Many of my competitors do it this way and it seems to work for them.