Tell HN: Show me the damn shipping fee | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Show me the damn shipping fee

13 pointsmproud7 comments

If you sell product that requires payment and shipment, and you want to improve your purchase conversion rate, please calculate and show the damn shipping fee right away!

I shouldn't have to create an account, I shouldn't have to type in payment details, and I shouldn't have to dig around your site to see what the amounts are.

Just have a box for me to enter my shipping address — maybe even on every item's store page! (and remember what I typed in) — and show me the cheapest shipping option. If/when I check out you can give me all sorts of crazy shipping options to choose from.

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"Just have a box for me to enter my shipping address..."

Even your full shipping address shouldn't be required in the U.S., just your 5-digit zip code. Actually, it might be fairly easy to guess what city a customer is in based on their IP address and fill in a default location automatically. If it's close enough, the customer wouldn't have to do anything.

This, by the way, is why I like Amazon Prime so much: I don't have to deal with any extra steps (physical or mental) to determine the shipping price - the purchase is frictionless. But that would work even if the shipping wasn't free, as long as the price that was listed included shipping.

Zip code. Yes. That's what I meant.

Yeeeeeeeees. Doubly important for international shipping. Countless times did I have to go through Amazon's checkout only to find out they won't ship a given item internationally (or that it costs >100$).

There's a slight complication with international shipping, but it's not related to this post.

Some carriers will 'helpfully' inspect the imported goods, work out what the import duties are, and then ask you to pay those duties and a fee to cover the work they did before they release the goods to you. I have no idea what they'd do if you presented them with a receipt showing that you had already paid the import duties on the item. It is very frustrating to pay a lot of money for shipping and the. Have to pay extra for an unwanted service.

I strongly agree.

What are the reasons for not showing shipping fees?

Is it a bit complicated? (Like US sales tax)

Or is it just a desire to show the lowest cost possible until the customer has almost finished the buying process, and then spring an $X charge and hope they don't abandon the cart?

Ebay UK and Amazon UK seem to mostly have this right. I wanted to buy a book. I found plenty at £0.01 but the shipping was clearly listed at £2.whatever. This makes me much more likely to actually buy.

(Incidentally the book was John Allen Paulos's "a mathematician reads the newspaper". A bargain at a few quid.)

> What are the reasons for not showing shipping fees?

Lazy design. They want you to finish shopping. I also think they want you to commit first. If someone goes through the hassle to set up an account, add the items to the account, type in billing information, only to find out the shipping is going to cost $5 or $10 more than they were expecting to pay, customers then might just decide to eat it. It’s too much work to go through all that again somewhere else.

Mind you, this whole issue is a lot better than it was years ago.

Hear! Hear!

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