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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Interesting for me is the amount of abandonment on for the "unexpected shipping costs" issue. I actually have this issue right now. I'm trying to buy cheesemaking cultures and because I'm half way around the world form most of the places that sell this stuff shipping can be more expensive than the thing I'm buying. It really bugs me that shipping calculation is usually last in the multi-page cart layouts. I definitely abandon because I'm not willing to enter all of that detail before I know how much I'm going to be spending.

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This is why I wrote our shopping cart so that when a user adds something to the cart for the first time, it immediately asks their country and postal code and calculates shipping charges.

The frustrating thing is this is such an anti-pattern that we _still_ get emails from potential customers requesting the cost of shipping to their country.

Try to auto guess based IP geolocation?

That’s one of the first thing I look for on an website: the shipping policy and amount.

If it’s not present (or too well hidden) I usually try another website.

I too hate the unpleasant surprise of high shipping costs

My number one complaint of shopify is that they require email first to see shipping, which means I'll get a "what's wrong? Forgot your cart?" Email later that day.

You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses.

The next question I always get is about how annoying it is to go make an email address in the middle of checking out is. I personally always have a shell open - I'm a command line person. So I just run a script, `nem spammystore-com190621`, done. (And then `dem spammystorewhatever` when they start annoying me.)

I've fantasized about writing a browser plugin that scans the page for entered email addresses and shells out to create them on submit, but (a) I'm not even sure that's entirely possible anymore, and (b) wiring my browser up to something that runs sudo on remote machines seems like maybe not the best idea I've ever had.

You could create a SUID executable on your remote machine that gets addresses from an unprivileged account and creates the mailboxes, or a daemon that gets them from the network.

But I guess the easiest way would be to throw all the email into a catch-all inbox and filter it by mailbox.

Anyway, I've stopped doing that after I got locked out of a store because I couldn't remember the address I registered, and it would neither let me reset my password without I entering my email or create a new account with the same data of one that already existed. Luckily this one a shitty store so getting locked out was a gain, but the odds of this happening to something important are not low.

I used to use a different email address for placing orders, requesting info, etc. and then I'd just check that inbox when I was looking for something or just wanted to skim to look for deals, etc. However, as tends to happen with filtering, I basically just stopped looking. And I didn't really mean all of this mail to go to dev/null.

These days I tend to find that Google tabs work well enough that I don't really get overwhelmed by all the email going to the Promotions tab.

It’s possible with native messaging. You write a content script that injects some JavaScript to check the page that then messages with background page that then messages an external application. Though I likely would make it a page action or a context menu action.

I think if you’re on OS X that it would be easier to write a small automater action that you register as a service that after you select some text and right click it it parses the text and calls the shell command.

I have a catch-all inbox on my domain so there's no setup. I can just enter <whatever_i_want>@example.com and I'll get the email in the catch-all inbox.

I did that for a while, but stopped probably a decade ago. A spam robot educated me about my mistake when it sent me many, many gigs of crap, using a dictionary of some sort to guess usernames. Surprise! they all "worked".

No need for the dictionary: I regularly get spam to addresses that are just random sequences of letters.

> You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses.

I'd be surprised if there isn't a service for that.

There's tons. https://www.spamgourmet.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/

Take the opportunity to tell them what's wrong: that you want shipping costs up front. Then create a spam filter for the site and be happy to stuck a blow for justice that may help customers in future.

This happened to me on Mother's Day. They already had me, I was committed, and then they tacked on $25 shipping (this is not a heavy item) in two separate charges for some reason. I abandoned and got almost the exact same item cheaper on Amazon with free shipping.

All they had to do was not be greedy-- I probably would have paid up to $10 for shipping even knowing it was inflated, even knowing I could probably find the item cheaper, just to get it over with. If you can't land that kind of sale you're doing something wrong. Of course, maybe I'm the idiot and they're making bank by ripping people off, but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with a place like that.

> All they had to do was not be greedy--

I think you meant "all they had to do was use enormous volumes to benefit from being a logistical priority and huge economies of scale in their shipping process."

I work for a smaller e-commerce company\* (specifically with the fulfillment centers, so very much in tune with shipping/logistics). $25 would make sense for an individual shipping one-off boxes (and - in the US - not doing the smart thing and using USPS flat rate boxes), but (assuming a reasonably-sized box and ground service) that's exorbitant for any company shipping out even tens of boxes a day (let alone hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands).

Without further context (or an exact weight, or whether they were gonna use an expedited or overnight service) it's hard to say how cheap they could go, but $25 seems too high. Either the seller is really small scale or they need to renegotiate their rates.

----

\* We're big enough to have a bit of negotiating power, especially with smaller/regional carriers, but we're nowhere near Amazon-scale.

Every e-commerce startup starts with their first 5 orders to their first 5 customers, and has to either make a loss on all those initial customers, or charge exorbitant shipping.

In my view, there are 3 bits of effort for shipping:. Pickup, transit/routing, and dropoff.

Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case. Pickup and dropoff should cost the same.

That means, in the worst case, a small e-commerce seller sending only 1 item per day could expect to pay double, since they pay the pickup and dropoff price with no volume discount.

Prices for delivery services don't reflect that though, suggesting market inefficiency.

> Pickup and dropoff are the parts which could benefit from volume, but dropoff can't benefit from volume in the e-commerce case.

It can come close. Most US carriers (or at least most of the bigger ones) offer a USPS hybrid service (e.g. UPS SurePost, FedEx SmartPost, etc.) that delegates to USPS for the last-mile delivery/dropoff. Unsurprisingly, these services tend to be cheaper than standard "ground" services, since USPS is already driving mail trucks to every mailbox (or at the very least every neighborhood) so their costs are more constant (not entirely constant, since a package takes up more space on the truck than the usual junk mail, but more constant than UPS or FedEx having to drive a truck for a one-off delivery).

But yeah, absolutely brand-new startups will have higher costs. Those go down pretty quick, though, and it might even be okay to take the loss on those initial customers (and assign it to "marketing" or "customer acquisition" or however else you wanna record that in the books).

I wish companies would just raise prices a little and eat the shipping costs themselves. Don’t make me worry about it. Advertised price should be as-shipped. Y’all are competing with Amazon’s free slow shipping and eBay where a huge amount (gotta be over 80%) of sellers offer free shipping.

There's some problems with this: 1) What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon. 2) What if they're in another country? Even Amazon doesn't do free, slow shipping to other countries from their US site, nor do any Ebay sellers. 3) If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller. Shipping in the US has gotten pretty expensive lately, if you're not Amazon. If they order multiple items, it's much more economical, but you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item, so you're not competitive with other sellers who do combined shipping.

> What if they want faster shipping? I'm not going to pay for 1-day express shipping for everyone; that's very expensive when you're not Amazon.

People absolutely expect to pay for fast shipping; people just expect baseline slow shipping to be free.

> What if they're in another country?

Depends on the industry you're in, but it seems a lot less reasonable to expect free international shipping, unless you're buying something that costs high-three-figures or four-figures.

> If they only order one small item, the shipping cost is a very large percentage of the total cost to the seller.

USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping.

> you've now priced all your items with the assumption that they're only buying that one item

You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point.

>USPS and hybrid shipping options can be relatively cheap, for domestic shipping.

Actually, they really aren't, not for private shippers. If your item is tiny, you can ship it for around $3 by 1st class; if it's over 1 pound, it's not going to be cheap. For something that only costs $5-10, that's very significant.

>You could always offer multiple-item discounts at that point.

People look at initial price first, and won't see your discount until later. The competitor with a cheaper per-item price will get the sale.

If someone makes me fill in multiple pages of forms (much less credit card details!) before springing an extra cost on me, I'm not gonna buy anything from them ever. EVER.

Every electronics manufacturer and distributor. Digikey has a calculator and Arrow has a chart but some-- TI, iirc-- make it difficult to get ones or twos.

Yes! Or even worse: you have to create an account first to get to the shipping calculation, only to find out they don't ship to your country or charge exorbitant shipping fees...

Funnily enough I usually bounce at the opposite issue, living in a smaller city in Australia, if a shop doesn't offer express post or a courier, I regularly have to wait 3-4 weeks for it to arrive through standard post.

If there are no shipping options, I shop around for the same product elsewhere, express post is usually only $10AUD more and will sometimes arrive 1-2 days later, usually never more than 4 days. Couriers for $30AUD will usually definitely arrive 1-2 days later. Even ordering internationally can be faster than standard post to my address these days.

So I usually bail out of a transaction if there's no shipping options, its easier to just find another source than it is to ask and arrange for shipping personally.

It blows my mind that I can order an item from China and have it air mailed to me in three days over the weekend, with no shipping charge.

But a similar sized package from an Australian seller will often take three days for the vendor to send then five days to get to Launceston and cost $15 for shipping.

I understand all the factors at play, but still...

Ah yes, Australia Post. I've had items come from Melbourne to Perth -- a dozen connecting flights daily, all with spare freight capacity bought by AusPost for express -- take three fucking weeks for the highest-paid express.

I've had parts come from Germany to Perth in 3 days. On the mid-cost freight option. Via Frankfurt and then Singapore.

Australia Post is an essential institution and somehow they manage to be entirely useless.

I live in Sydney and sometime items coming from Sydney or Melb can take longer than items coming from US

Shipping cost should be given before asking your credit card data. Doing otherwise is unacceptable.

As an Australian this is my life whenever ordering anything from the US.

A shipping estimator should be available on the product page. That's where I need it.

Could be worse. I tried to buy some model rocket parts (engines) for my model Falcon 9 a few months back, got to the checkout page, and was told I couldn't ship to my address in the Netherlands because of US export controls. Now that's a real conversion killer!

Amazon was particularity bad for my location.

For Austria they use the German shop, but Germany has different VAT and a lot of sellers don't ship to Austria.

When ordering it didn't show how much it cost and if shipping is possible at all.

I would love if websites tried to autodetect my country from my IP address, and then gave me a upper bound on the potential shipping cost given where it thinks I am.

It's time websites just added the shipping cost and the product cost together and advertise that.

I don't want to see a Google shopping result saying "Get these shoes for only $10", only to find shipping is $35.

It should be illegal to advertise a product online for anything less than the cost to have it delivered.

Shipping cost is the first information you see not only during checkout but in cart and next to the product on product page or even list. If you have varying shipping price you should give range and after clicking range you should let user specify address to get precise shipping cost.

My employer works around this issue (last I checked) by just charging a flat shipping+handling fee for non-VIP customers (VIP customers get free shipping and various other perks in exchange for their yearly membership fee).

This is one of the big reasons why Amazon wins. For most products, you look at site X vs Amazon for price because shipping is well known. It's either prime or free slow-boat.

Eventually, you get trained to just go to Amazon.

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