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Comment by FrozenVoid | Hacker News Reader

>Shipping fees.

>People hate paying for shipping. They despise it. It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I'm convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years.

>People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree. We know this because our first attempt to address this was to show, in the shopping cart and checkout process,

"People hate shipping charges irrationally", because they perceive them as unfair additional tax that distorts price and makes it harder to compare prices. If price was including shipping/vat/taxes as single variable no one would be confused by it. Its not a magic asymptotic limit, its basic psychology: People want simple interfaces, simpler solutions, simpler interactions.

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I just got back from Europe. I loved the way that the price of each object was exactly what I paid. The coffee for 2 euros? It actually cost 2 euros.

Now I am in the USA. I go to buy a large coffee for $2.79 and I end up paying $3.10. I hate this very much.

Here right now and it’s nice being able to actually use coins rather than have them be ever-accumulating nuisances as they are in the US. Not that often will you receive/need 0.01 coins and almost everything is priced in multiples of 0.10 outside of supermarkets

Curious how this affects the velocity of M0 money

Well, when you hand over 2 euros that is inclusive of VAT (which if US resident you are not required to pay/entitled to rebate from the government) so the cost of a coffee is not really what's shown.

edit: all the downvotes.. want to reply instead?

I did not downvote you, but I can imagine people are down voting you because you seem to be making an effort to miss the point. The point is taxes are included in prices in Europe, but taxes are not included in prices in the USA.

The biggest issue with taxes, and shipping fees. Is that it becomes this last minute price increase at the very end of your shopping experience. We all know it's there, but it sucks seeing a shipping fee that is half 25% the cost of the item. Give us the full cost up front, if we want it, then we'll take it. But stop wasting our time with only finding out after we've filled our carts.

The tough part about this is you can't calculate the shipping fees until you know where the customer lives. And there's no better way to make customers leave your webstore than requiring a name and physical address before you're even allowed to browse (or be shown prices).

nah zipcode is plenty sufficient. You can easily provide a little message on product pages saying, "want to know the full price?", with an input box for your code. Save it in a cookie. Or location aware?

It's the same as all the prices should be with tax

The problem is that it's hard to make it really look that simple. If you order a number of items at once, the shipping costs can probably be amortized throughout them. It's difficult to make an incentive system that makes customers want to do that without shipping costs.

"People want simple interfaces, simpler solutions, simpler interactions."

Under what circumstances?

Numerous airlines, Southwest excluded, come to mind as an anti-example--moving toward a more complicated, convoluted pricing and buying model for tickets.

What consumers want != what corporations want. If that complex scheme is more profitable, it will be used. Perhaps this interface to buying tickets allows them to segregate the market better or exploit some psychological flaw.

I agree that what consumers want!=what corporations want.

The implicit point in my post above is that consumers are voting with their wallets for the low-cost fares, that are complicated and convoluted. So in this instance of airline tickets, there is large consumer demand for cheap tickets, simplicity be damned.

Southwest is the option for those who want simple and are willing to pay for it.

Amazon gave consumers simple and cheap.

And airlines one of the most hated experiences. It's proving the point.

What about tipping culture then? I wonder if that will go away as ecommerce becomes the norm.

Possible difference: - Shipping charges are presented to the buyer in a visceral way before they commit to the transaction. - Menu prices (sans tip) are presented to a diner and then they commit to the transaction. Later on, the tip rears its ugly head. This time delay is possibly enough for people to separate the tip as "later me's problem", or at least blissfully ignore it.

Also restaurants aren't all exactly the same, so lack of tipping can't be used as a strong point of comparison against their competition.

Two TVs for the same base price, one with $49.99 shipping from Best Buy, and one with free (with prime) from Amazon? I'll go with Amazon because the product is exactly the same.

Those two Italian places down the street, except one of them doesn't do tipping? Sure I'll take that into account, but more importantly, which one has better food? And which has a better base price? Which one is quicker (or maybe which is more relaxed)? Which one gets my order right? This is all just as or more important than whether or not they a part of the tipping culture.

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