So, yes, you can estimate shipping for a single item but you can't always present the per-item shipping charge as it depends on the context of the whole order.
So, yes, you can estimate shipping for a single item but you can't always present the per-item shipping charge as it depends on the context of the whole order.
Yes, a lot of smaller e-commerce platforms could do this, but finalizing order value can be a very complex workflow for bigger merchants with more varied sku mixes.
I’ve worked in multi-billion dollar Ecom companies where the programs to refine the order checkout process gets scoped as a multi year effort accounting for a couple of decades of legacy cruft... even if you separate the “product/tax/shipping” calculations from the “customer/credit/rewards” dependencies. But it’s often not worth separating them because they’re very inter-dependent. Moreso when you involve drop shipping or made-to-order things.
You are still left with the same scenario as if the store listed the individual shipping price on the front page
Google isn't going to know what other items you _might_ add to show you a "real" shipping cost
There’s a lot of legitimate case were showing shipping price upfront is just not doable or valuable to the customer.
BTW there are a surprising amount of shops for specialized goods that won’t even list the final price at the end. The customer places an order, and they update it with a finalized price after a human looks at the content, and from there the customer is free to pay the transaction or give up the order.
It's the T (taxes) part that may be still a tipping point these days, but it's just between vendor and your state,
In my experience, the most fluctuations were on international shipping by small vendors. Lego bricks for instance, where it makes a big difference if you request 5 small pieces that weight 20g total and can wait 3 months, or if it's 500+g in a middle sized box and you want it in 2 days.
Even with average indication on what to expect, depending on the combination you are requesting the vendor might use a different carrier, different shipping method and so on. They could make it more simple with a range of arbitrary standard fees, but then it costs a lot more to the customer, putting the vendor at a disadvantage price wise. In particular people have visceral reactions to overly high shipping prices.
Add items to card, check the total price and then decide whether to buy it(i remember trying to order some stuff form one japanese plamo store - and it didn't provide exact prices before checkout. I went through the process, but even the cheapest option for delivery was way too high - as 2x price of the whole order)
the important bit is to present it as a separate line item (with grand total) so that consumers can decide how much to trust the estimate.
that would be an even clearer shot across the bow of amazon, walmart, and the like, who provide comparison across their own platform merchants, but not across all merchants everywhere.
I don't see how this is relevant because ecommerce sites will change the price in the cart (or reveal it) before shipping is even calculated.
On top of all this, if all you're displaying is list price you can cache that very effectively and significantly reduce the load on your backend, probably by at least another order of magnitude. As with many things, items loaded on ecommerce sites tend to follow a Pareto distribution, for which caching is very effective. Adding a shipping address to the mix will destroy this caching ability, so not only are your requests 10x more expensive, 10x more of them now make it to the backend. There are various tricks you can do to try to have your cake and eat it too, but none of them are easy or simple. At the end of the day, while this is definitely a useful and desirable feature for customers, it has significant cost for both development time and hardware.
TL;DR this is actually a much more difficult technical problem to solve cost effectively at scale than it initially appears.
I ran an ecommerce platform company for many years and you had merchants with very complex shipping and tax schemes, or you had merchants that made it super simple with a basic rate table. The complex merchants had margin on every order at the cost of processing external API calls. The simple rate table merchants had great margin on some, lost money on others but were happy with their average shipping margin.
Shipping is often highly dependent on the location of the buyer and often involves full estimate calls from each carriers APIs (USPS, FedEx, UPS). The only major data point I would focus on is whether the shipping is free or flat rate.
Tax is even more complicated. Merchants often outsource tax calculations to a third-party service such as Avalara, which calculates unbelievably complex taxing schemes even down to the zip code, as tax laws are becoming increasingly more complex.
Because of these reasons taxes and shipping are not widely useful data points for search engines. That may change in the future, however. I could imagine it becoming another SEO topic to be accounted for, similar to meta tags on product pages.