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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, free shipping means the price of shipping is included in the product.

A long time ago I wrote a warehouse management system for a fishing gear manufacturer that shipped enough packages every day that they had a contract with a courier for a fixed price on their deliveries. Regardless of how many there were and where they were doing a lorry turned up at the warehouse at 4pm every day, all the outgoing packages got loaded on it, and off they went. It cost a lot but it was far cheaper than pricing the packages individually, especially as fishing rods are quite an unusual shape. It meant shipping was a fixed business cost, so the price was only part of the product price in the same way that the office rent was a part of the product cost, or the CEO's salary. I imagine quite a lot of B2C product businesses work the same way.

Sure. That's because a lot of the delivery business is fixed costs.

But still, depending on the cost and the average number of packages, it could come out as a significant cost per order.

Employee salaries would also come out as a significant cost per order. The point is that it might not make any more sense to pull out explicit shipping prices as it would to include an employee-salary fee on all products.

That's an interesting point.

The core reason why shipping costs were pulled out separately is that it allowed the customer to choose between various options freely, if they needed it tomorrow vs. whenever. If there's no choice, there's much less incentive to do that.

However, there's still at least a little something I can think of; shipping is generally not part of the sales tax. Rolling it into the price means you're also making your customers pay sales tax on it. That depends on whether you've got to pay tax on the item in question, of course, which varies every which way.

Just wanted to add that I work with a large ecommerce company and they have exactly the same arrangement. They do charge customers a token (small) amount for shipping but depending on the size/weight of the order some customers are paying over the odds and some under.

Customers also have the option to upgrade to faster shipping if they so wish.

Yeah, but it works great for Amazon but not as in the example in the article where someone sells maybe 10 products a month.

What worries me is the greed in human society, you have a company with profit but the leaders or shareholders want more and more each year, so when there is no more room for growing then someone needs to be milked harder and harder.

Barring live calculation of shipping based on location, for inclusion in the display price, this seems ideal.

IMHO it's not an advantage for the buyer: buying two items results would now result in you implicitly paying the shipping cost twice (I'm unfamiliar on if it was calculated like that etsy, but from my experience it's standard business practice in other e-shops to make you pay shipping only once for all items, if they can fit in the box).

In theory, it may not be. In practice, lots of sites that split out shipping make it hard to find out just what shipping will cost until you’re very deep in the checkout process, and then charge insane rates.

At Amazon, free shipping may be subsidized by the cloud storage business.

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