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Comment by dalai | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, if you want to buy two of them they cost $20 + $3 S&H or $26 with free shipping.

S&H is not always fixed-rate. In fact, "handling" two items should cost more. Shipping more weight should also cost more.

More than one shipping cost, yes, but it should be less than twice the shipping cost. Otherwise you could just order the items separately.

I bet a lot of people do not take into account of the time, fuel, wear-and-tear of their car to go get their wares.

Why is this surprising? Undesirable, sure, but shipping additional things costs additional money.

That greatly depends on the things.

What's your point?

That your generalization does not generally apply, especially in an era of extremely miniaturized popular goods.

Consolidating the S&H into the item cost makes sense for a subset of situations sure, but there's a huge set where it's exploitive.

Amazon orders for example often can amortize S&H costs by shipping a single package containing multiple items sharing a common origin. I'd argue that's true for a huge portion of Amazon orders. It's simply not a good generalization.

I disagree that it's exploitative. It's simply easier. Recalculating shipping costs on a combinatatorial basis has a nonzero cost from a programming and operations POV.

Having a fixed per-item shipping costs lowers overhead drastically, especially for smaller sellers. Large sellers obviously have different customers and I doubt they get away with just multiplying PER_ITEM_SHIPPING_COST X NUMBER_OF_ITEMS (I didn't think that was the focus on the OP though).

I also disagree that it does not generally apply. Given two items, A & B, you might have the following total:

    A_shipping + A_price = A_total
    B_shipping + B_price = B_total

What you're saying is that:

    AB_shipping + A_price + B_price < A_total + B_total

But what I'm saying is that:

    A_shipping < AB_shipping
    B_shipping < AB_shipping

In other words, no matter what, shipping more items does cost more than shipping less items. So it makes sense to charge more for it. How much more is a matter of economics.

Not as linear though.

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